


All the Kingdoms and Their Splendour

by TigerDragon



Category: Sherlock Holmes (Downey films), Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle
Genre: Addiction, Adultery, Bad Decisions, Blackmail, Canonical Character Death, Cocaine, Criminal Masterminds, Enabling, F/M, Fatherhood, Identity Issues, Letter of the Law, Lies, M/M, Mild S&M, Oh such bad decisions, Plotty, Secret Relationship, Separations, Sexual Content, Unplanned Pregnancy, Victorian, Victorian Attitudes, Wheels Within Wheels Within Wheels Within... well... you know, libidinous!Sherlock
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-28
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2017-11-17 04:55:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 26,382
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/547836
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TigerDragon/pseuds/TigerDragon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>It is not my habit, as it has so often been that of my dear friend Watson, to be compelled to record every minor problem to cross my path. Yet in this peculiar case, I find myself unable to order my own thoughts without committing a full account to paper. It will have to be burned, of course, lest it catch the eye of my brother - or worse, Watson - but perhaps its brief existence will aid me in ascertaining my own mind on these curious events....</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Tiger and Dragon are excited to note that, Sherlock Holmes being a public-domain story, we don't have to put an IP disclaimer on this. Isn't it shiny not to have to do the copyright-lawyer-deliverance rituals?
> 
> This particularly story takes a few cues from the recent Sherlock Holmes films on interpretation (particularly of Watson), but for the most part we aim to be faithful to the original stories when we aren't playing merry hell with them.

_It is not my habit, as it has so often been that of my dear friend Watson, to be compelled to record every minor problem to cross my path. Yet in this peculiar case, I find myself unable to order my own thoughts without committing a full account to paper. It will have to be burned, of course, lest it catch the eye of my brother - or worse, Watson - but perhaps its brief existence will aid me in ascertaining my own mind on these curious events...._  
  
 **30 October, 1888**  
  
The dawn had raised a cold, driving sleet against the windowpanes, its drumming a counterpoint to the aria and my own heartbeat which had become audible in my growing boredom. Thus far I had left the hypodermic needle secreted in its case under the divan; in a most unusual affliction of sentiment, I could not quite bring myself to indulge in the practice so detested by my doctor.  
  
I shall not dwell long on the subject of his absence from my quarters, save to say that I understood at the time that both his practice and marriage were proceeding to his utmost satisfaction. That I should thus be deprived of my Boswell, when I have so often railed against the sensationalist style of his little pamphlets, should have seemed no hardship. Yet I found my energies at a low ebb, and while my brain hungered for problems I could but little stir myself to search my correspondence for them. For six years before he entered my life, I found all my own cases - how strange, then, that upon his departure I should find this temporarily abandoned practice so difficult to resume.   
  
There was, of course, the matter of my investigation regarding the Professor. That provided not inconsiderable solace in both its complexity and its demand upon my energies, but the time was not ripe for a full pursuit of the matter and would not be for some time. London was chary with data upon that topic in the autumn of 1888, and I am not one to try to make bricks without straw. Too much attachment clouds the deductive facilities.   
  
While I had spent only the mid-morning lost in unproductive contemplation, there came a knock at the door. “Mister Holmes,” an aggrieved Mrs. Hudson called through my door, “You have a visitor. I warned her, but she insists on seeing you.”   
  
With my bow drawing a long, minor chord from the violin, I called a reassurance to my landlady.  “You will be held blameless for any unpleasantness, Mrs. Hudson. Do kindly show her in.”  
  
My guest was a tall woman - perhaps so much as a hundred and seventy six centimeters - of graceful carriage, her features and frame concealed in a voluminous grey cloak which was half-sodden with rain despite the sheen of oil which had been worked into it, and she passed into my rooms without any of the hesitation or uncertainty which so often marks my female clients. She made her way to the grate, stirring the coals and adding fresh fuel from the scuttle with hands that were gloved in broad leather against the elements, then seated herself in the large armchair beside the fire which I had so often made my own habitual abode during Watson’s many years of residence. In all of this she was quite silent, and gave away so little about herself that I was - in spite of my unavoidable irritation at the disordering of my natural environment - in some small measure intrigued.   
  
It was almost a disappointment when she cast back the hood of the cloak and removed the gloves, presenting herself to my inspection. I had hoped the little mystery might preserve itself a bit longer.   
  
I took my own time in returning my violin to its case and the case to its place on the inside wall, taking the opportunity to observe her. In several half-glances I saw a complexion fair enough to be prized by fashionable society, dark curls collected in a respectable coiff, dark eyes watching my own movements with a curious, active fascination which at the time I thought might indicate some romantic notion or unsatisfied morsel of gossip to which she was seeking confirmation. The hands were elegantly gloved in dark silk, so they yielded but little beyond the expense of the gloves and their maker, but the artfully applied make-up was not quite sufficient to erase the lines at the corners of her eyes which gave away her age. A married woman, then - it was most unlikely that a lady of repute who had entered upon her third decade would have the resources for such fine gloves without a husband.   
  
I offered her a bow worthy of a _ton_ soiree.  “Madam...?”  
  
“Smith-Jones,” she offered dryly, her lip curving up at the corner in a silent acknowledgement of her own deception. “I have taken the liberty of requesting your housekeeper to provide us with tea and sandwiches, Mister Holmes, which I hope you will not find too much of an imposition.”  
  
“Not at all, Madam Smith-Jones,” I answered. “Shall we discuss your case over refreshment, then?”  
  
“Quite.” Her smile grew noticeably, as though she took personal pleasure in the invitation. “You are a most remarkable man, Mister Holmes. London never seems to grow tired of speaking of you. I hope you will not take it amiss if I tell you that I have been quite enchanted by your friend’s recounting of your adventures - the good doctor is an engaging, if perhaps too sensational, writer. I read in the papers that he has recently married. A happy occasion, I trust?”  
  
While true that many knew of my career and of Watson’s place in it, I could not help but feel somehow exposed before this woman’s interest. Affecting a genial mood, I smiled whilst noting that she had removed all her jewelry, evident in her pierced ears and the slight narrowing of her third finger near the palm as if a ring worn habitually had been recently removed. “Very happy. No one deserves it more than he.”   
  
“A true friend, then. One can never have too many of those, don’t you think, Mister Holmes?” It was a very solicitous smile, as though perhaps she suspected my loneliness in Watson’s absence, but I was forced to chide myself for allowing my own emotions to intrude upon the deductive process. It was impossible, truly, to know for certain whether it was a true sympathy that I perceived in her face or a projection of my own unconfessed desire for such sympathy. The uncertainty was quite maddening, and I fear that my disposition - never the most restrained - failed me at that moment.   
  
I allowed my fingers to steeple before my chin, staring unreservedly at my guest. “No jewelry, clothing nondescript but fine, obvious pseudonym, complete nonchalance in making yourself at home, detailed information about myself and colleague, clear interest not just in my services but my person. You are a lady of quality, Madam, one who does not care to be known yet wishes very much to know me. I am afraid I must disappoint you in this, and I am uncertain if I must disappoint you in the former as well. I am uncertain I will find what you ask of me to my liking.”  
  
“I think you will, Mister Holmes. I would not have troubled you with it were it a matter for a less clever man - many of my peers, I understand, have written to you on trivial matters and received no answer or a reproof of the most blistering kind.” She folded her hands in her lap, tilting her head and allowing her lips to bow in a delicate smile of the most charming kind, but it was the eyes which held my attention - fathomless and lingering, as though she were striving to drink in the sight of me as deeply as possible. “The facts are these - there is a man of my circle who has a great deal of influence, gained as much by wealth as by birth, and in the past months I have noticed that his enemies grow silent and reserved when he moves upon a project which will enrich him at the public expense and grow bold only upon those topics of but little interest to him. I am further struck by the fact that my own husband has made payments of gambling debts to this man, despite the most pertinent detail that my husband is not and has never been a gambling man. Lastly, I note that this man has a wife who is seen rarely and heard never, whose disappearance from London society was made complete some four months past, and that he now appears engaged upon the pursuit of a very close friend of mine - a pursuit that ought to have had no prospects whatsoever, and yet which she seems most curiously disinclined to refuse. It is a set of facts which defies my imagination to conjure an explanation for, Mister Holmes, and yet I see it causing great harm everywhere I look. If you will not take it to settle my mind, then surely you will take it for the interests of the public and those of my friend, the Viscountess Hereford?”  
  
Despite the unwelcome personal attention, I must confess that I spared no thought to the decision to take the case. Perhaps a day will come when I will leave blackmail, disappearances, adultery and murder to other keen, if less capable, minds.   
  
“Safeguarding the public from villains is one of my duties, yes,” I replied slowly. “Yet I still have little knowledge on which to judge this case. I understand your reluctance to give name to those involved, but without specifics I am as useful to you as the _Times._ ”   If that day is to come, it is not yet on the horizon.  
  
“Of course.” She touched her gloved fingertips to the hollow of her throat, as if in apology, and then smiled again with an intimacy which suggested she had decided to take me into the inner circle of her trust. “The man’s name is Rutledge, and I will tell you all that you ask of me.”  
  
 _It was a lengthy interview, more than requiring the tea for which she sent, and the details of which are both irrelevant to the matter at hand and quite sensitive. I shall not commit them to pen and ink here, no matter that I mean to set this whole chronicle to the torch later. It suffices to say that Rutledge was a brute, if a clever one, and that I had but to spend a few weeks on the matter to box him neatly for the Yard and ensure his ruin in the press. Still, it was not without its diversions and excitements, and when I returned to my quarters on the night of his downfall I was in the highest of spirits._  
  
 **24 November, 1888**  
  
When I took the seventeen steps from the street to my rooms at 221B, I must surely have been a sight to scandalize my more proper neighbours. I have often read Watson’s descriptions of myself upon the hunt, the flash of my eyes and the flush of my cheeks, and I confess that he has often moderated his description in an effort to spare my dignity. Upon the successful solution of a problem of suitable complexity, I am like a man transported, and surely the rapture of the moment is not so far from that of the Creator when gazing upon the completion of His work. But even the memory has driven me into a foolish and metaphorical vein, so perhaps I linger on it out of some desire to avoid recording what followed.   
  
It is a tiresome, ordinary fault. I will go on, and pride may be damned.  
  
I knew at once upon passing the tenth step that I would not be alone in my rooms, for the delicate footprints of street sediment and rainwater there were unmistakable. Yet I was not overly concerned, for only the slightest of men could have left such marks, and I have been accosted in my rooms more than once. Indeed, I was so elated and caught up in my triumph that I recall laughing when I drew my revolver and pushed open the door, prepared to face a whole legion of villains if that was what the night had in store for me.   
  
My employer, her dark hair subtly slick with the rain and her cloak, fine leather boots and traveling gloves left to dry before the roaring fire, sat in my chair with one of my volumes on the history of crime propped open in a delicate hand and lifted her eyes to me with only the faintest flicker of alarm at the sight of my revolver. “My dear Mister Holmes,” she breathed so softly that it was nearly lost in the crackle of the wood in my grate, “surely you do not feel that such an implement will be needed for our meeting?”  
  
The firearm already returned to its place in my waistcoat, I gave her an apologetic smile, ready to indulge her presence, so ebullient was my disposition. “Madam, I am but carried away on the euphoria of success. I noted your footprints on the stair and came to erroneous conclusions.” Hanging my sodden overcoat on the rack, my hat long since soaked through, I proceeded to the decanters among the chemistry equipment. “Brandy?”  
  
“Please.” Her delight was as bright and warm in the room as the fire, her face illuminated by it in a way that made her seem a decade younger than her years, and when she saw the smile of triumph I could not well suppress she laughed in such a fine and ringing way that I was quite taken by it. “You have done marvelously, Mister Holmes - far beyond my expectations. I have had word already as to the completeness of your victory, and I can only congratulate you in the most fervent terms on the dispatch and brilliance of your conduct in this matter. You are everything I have heard and more.”  
  
As dear Watson has observed, I am quite susceptible to the flattery of my intellect, a fault which I endeavor to overcome yet find unable to completely escape. “I thank you, Madam. You are most kind, and most wise not to trust completely in what you have heard.” When I’d delivered her brandy, I began to prepare my own, still smiling at her appreciation and charm.  
  
“It is in the nature of mankind to lie as easily as they breathe, Mister Holmes, and I have long since learned that any claim I have of another’s lips is best to be taken with the utmost of reserve. But you are even more perfect in the proof than your reputation would have suggested, so perhaps it is in mitigating rather than exaggerating your abilities that the mouths of others have deceived me.” She took her brandy with long, graceful sips, seeming but little affected by it, and there was nothing of fragility or meekness about her when she cast her smile on me - indeed, quite the opposite. “You have done me a very great service, Mister Holmes, and you have my gratitude as well as my admiration. You must, I pray you, call me Olivia now and in future - you have done too much for me to stand upon propriety.”  
  
Had I been unaffected and in a sober mood I would have refused; such familiarity with one’s clients is neither desirable nor proper. Unfortunately, I was neither. I raised my brandy towards her, the firelight refracting through its amber prism in an aesthetically pleasing manner. “In that case, Olivia, I offer a toast to the health of London’s most winning lady.”   
  
“You are too kind, Mister Holmes.” She answered my toast with the touch of her glass, took a long swallow, then lifted her own again. In its reflected sparks, I was struck again - quite against my natural custom - by the beauty which her delightful energy seemed to illuminate from within. “And to London’s foremost mind, unequalled in quality in its time and unparalleled in skill in the long history of deduction and the dispatch of villainy. A toast, sir, to the inimitable Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street.”  
  
In echo of her movements I raised my own glass, some as-yet aloof part of my mind marvelling at my sudden and strange enchantment by my employer, a part which I paid no heed. “I must say I quite enjoyed the challenge to my faculties that your case provided,” I confided. “Of course I regret the suffering wrought by the villain, but I have yet to find problems as deliciously complex as the mysteries of a clever man bent to the wrong.”  
  
Her breathless laughter was sufficient to draw the eye to the fine dark fabric of her dress and the corset beneath, the view of her cleavage which might have been prevented by the jewels so carefully removed quite bare to my observation, and when she cast back the last of her brandy and rose to her feet, she passed so close to me that I fancied I felt the heat of the fire in her eye reflected upon my own skin. “You must tell me everything,” she breathed, her voice as desperate as though she were burned with fever, “everything, Mister Holmes, for there is no-one to chronicle this tale but the gossips and the servants and I would not miss a single gem of insight and deduction for all the treasures of the world. I beg you, do not deny me, for having stood so close to your light it would be agony to be denied its least refraction.”  
  
Would that my dear Watson had still been living at 221B, for he would have put an end to the ridiculous improprieties at once. As I would later deduce, Lady Olivia Cavendish was an expert at exploiting my numerous character flaws and did so without a hint of reservation.   
  
When I had finished regaling Olivia with my exploits, the Lady rapt on my every word, she fixed me with a look yet more intense than I had believed any woman capable. We had alighted at last on the divan, her hands at rest upon my shoulder and knee while she listened, and when I had laid bare every twist and turn of the investigation she lifted herself by the firm pressure of her hands upon me so that she could bring her mouth to mine in a kiss that was as stunning as it was unexpected. I have only once before found the experience pleasant and never compelling; what is the press of skin and breath compared to the thrill of the hunt or the kinship of spirit afforded by a loyal companion? Yet for all its common and mundane foolishness, I was unforeseeably overwhelmed by the ardour of my client’s passion and the absolute intensity of its focus upon myself. I had once as a youth seen a Russian tiger set upon and maul its keeper when an exhibition had been sabotaged, and in retrospect I cannot help but compare the poor man’s experience to my own that night - no so much in wounds, of which his were by far the more severe, as in the sheer helplessness of the experience. I was quite carried away, so much so that we were upon the floor before the fire and I was quite on the verge of the carnal act itself before any semblance of reason could move me to the slightest protest. It was, inevitably, the most obvious - embarrassingly so, even at the time.   
  
“Olivia,” I began, through the heated tumble of my own breath, “your husband....”  
  
Her eyes flashed imperiously, her voice as harsh and dismissive as though I had raised some trifling matter whose answer should have been entirely apparent to me. “To the devil with my husband,” she hissed into my mouth, and drew me down upon her with such urgency that it was beyond my limited capacity - and, though I tremble to admit it, my limited interest - to deny her.  
  
I am sorry to say that I regret my actions much less than I should. That it is a weakness with me to care little for the proprieties of the matter, I must freely grant, and that it was one which I had not before that moment suspected made me all the more susceptible to it. It is the more taxing to admit that our coupling was neither brief nor half-hearted, and that I found in the study of her pleasure as much satisfaction as I had in the case which she had brought me.  
  
When she had finished with me and lay atop me before the guttering glow of the fire, she lifted herself and ran her fingertips along my cheek with a possessive affection which I did not then understand. “My dear Mister Holmes,” she whispered into my mouth, “you are truly a most satisfactory man. I could not be more contented with you had you brought me the Empire bound in a bushel and ready for my collection.”  
  
As compromised as my reason was at the time, it was then that I began to infer her hidden motivations. “It is just as well, in that case, since I believe Her Majesty might take exception to your ascension, my Empress.”   
  
“People can be so very picky about their toys,” she observed, her mouth curved in an intimate smile even as she affected petulance, and then she slid from me and began the delicate, artful straightening of my garments with the slender, clever hands with which I had so recently become so personally familiar. “Your gift, Mister Holmes, was far more delightful.”  
  
“You may later regret encouraging my self-regard, Olivia,” I replied with a smirk. “Most find it tiresome eventually.”  
  
“I assure you, Mister Holmes, that I shall not be one of those foolish people. Your self-regard is most well-earned, and I believe you may even hold yourself too lightly.” My garments set to rights, she attended to her own in turn, though this she did without taking her eyes from me - as though she was loathe to waste even a moment of my sight, or as though she had no need of her eyes to know the mending of her own appearance. In cold retrospect, I cannot help but suspect that both were the case. “If ever you have the least desire for me to call upon you and hear the progress of one of your cases, I would deem it the most princely of gifts if you were to send word to me so that I may do so.”  
  
Standing and offering her my arm, I nodded my assent. In that moment, I fear there was but little I would not have agreed to if it would have preserved that smile of delight upon her lips. “My work often consumes my days and I am a notoriously bad correspondent, but I will not forget your offer.”  
  
“That is all the I ask. I would not presume to come between you and your profession - quite the opposite, in fact, for it is that very activity which I find most congenial.” She laid her hand upon my arm to rise, leaning up to press one more burning kiss upon my lips and leave the delicate trace of her freshly-applied lipstick there, then tucked a stray strand of my hair from my face. “Now, I will not overstay my welcome. You have taxed yourself most considerably, and there may well be new cases on the morrow which will demand your energies. You must rest and recover, my dear Mister Holmes, so that you will be fully fit for your next investigation.”  
  
Escorting her to the door, once she had the opportunity to don her outer garments, I murmured agreement. We lingered there a few moments, each strangely reluctant to part, until at last her gloved fingers caught my wrist and gently guided my hand from her arm so that she could vanish down the seventeen steps to the street as quietly as she must have come. It was only once I had closed the door and returned to my parlor, stoking the fire back into life and bracing myself with another brandy, that I became aware of how completely her scent and my own had permeated the room. It was most disconcerting, and I was seized with a sudden and irrational fear that my dear Watson would choose this evening for a late visit - so much so that I was driven to cast open the windows and let the cold, rainy air of London spill inside so as to conceal the evidence of my transgressions.   
  
It was the first time since I had taken my last dose of cocaine that I had felt the need to conceal my behavior within my own quarters from my closest friend, but it would not be the last.


	2. Chapter 2

_It is with regret that I must admit that I was not immune to the temptation of Olivia’s invitation, and in the months that followed I called upon her to visit me with greater regularity than any other party - my dear friend Watson included. It was both a base lust and my desire to apprehend that baseness in myself, so typically above such matters as to vex my understanding; besides this, it provided both stimulation in itself and a spur to my work, and so we spoke often of the cases which came to me by letter while indulging ourselves in the most compromising fashion.  Of my private war against the Professor I did not speak - whether this was at the bidding of some wise instinct buried in my mind or some misguided desire to protect her, I do not know. Yet after some seven months she ceased to respond to my invitations save by letter, though this correspondence was so vivid and witty that it almost compensated me for her absence. That ‘almost,’ however, was enough to drive me to investigate. It took some weeks for me to be certain, but by the third week of July I was quite sure of her identity: Her Grace Olivia Minerva Cavendish, The Duchess of Devonshire, who had of late entered confinement in the expectation of a new addition to her brood of children._  
  
_An entirely new anxiety leapt upon me like an animal. The only details that allowed me any rest was that my colouring was very like Olivia’s own, and that His Grace was not familiar with my features. I ceased my correspondence at once, telling myself that this was for our mutual security, and it must have seemed so to her as well for I received no letters from her after her last went unanswered. We passed five more months in isolated silence, hers the more literal and my own quite self-made, until I learned by notice in the paper that the Duchess of Devonshire had returned to London in the company of her husband. I was at once seized by the need to know the result of her confinement, happy or otherwise, and it was only by the greatest discipline that I restrained myself from going to the Duke’s residence at once in disguise to satisfy my curiosity. Instead I sent word by our usual post to Olivia, who returned my letter with a private invitation to attend her in her music room upon the seventh of December. No means were specified, but I had told her so much of my method by now that my suspicions were not aroused by her trust that I could obtain entry unseen or unnoticed._  
  
**7 December, 1889**  
  
The music room was lit only by a dim handful of electric lights, their carbon filaments glowing feverishly behind the heavy frosting of their glass shells, and the delicate, longing Schumann being performed upon the grand Steinway which rested at the heart of the room was a match for the languid stillness that pervaded the atmosphere. It was a setting which stilled the voice and softened the step, the sort which demanded the greatest urgency to be disturbed, and even upon the errand which I was pursuing I was not entirely immune to its effect. I could not afford to be long delayed, however, for the pretext of my entrance - a professional man of early middle years, driven by ambition to plead his case with the lady of the house for her husband’s preferment in the Parliament and desperate enough to pay off the help for assistance - was too thin to allow me to remain any longer than I had to. Yet watching Olivia’s slender, capable hands caress the keys with the same careful confidence and certainty with which they had mastered my own flesh, I found I could neither speak nor take my eyes away until she came at last to the final resonant chord and turned to look at me through the half-veil of her dark curls.  
  
She was paler than I remembered, bearing fresh lines of pain in her face and dark circles beneath her eyes. She had clearly not fully recovered from the arduous labor of childbirth, but in that worn gauntness the haughty strength and fierceness of her was all the more apparent.  
  
“Subtle and accomplished as always, Your Grace.” I found myself longing for the privacy of my own rooms, that I might embrace her. “You are undiminished by your absence.”  
  
“My dear man,” she murmured, and her eyes met mine with such focused attention that I knew my disguise had fooled her not even a moment, “you are too kind. I am not quite well enough to be about town yet, but I have no small desire to return to my usual habits. The country may be good for the constitution, but it is poor meat and drink for the mind.”  
  
With another step, I laid my hand to rest on the gleaming surface of the piano’s top board in an effort to maintain the distance between myself and Olivia. “I am sure Society will be equally pleased with your return, as London was not the same without you.”  
  
“London is the world, and the world London.” She waved an airy hand that happened to brush my wrist, the pressure of her slim fingers as momentary as it was distractingly pleasant, and then she dropped her voice the barest whisper as she flicked her eyes up to look into mine. “And the devil may take Society,” she breathed, “because it is not their company I have been most keenly missing.”  
  
At her words my blood began racing through my veins, a feral anticipation goading it on, and I could not prevent myself from answering her in kind. “As I have been bereft of more than an audience for my cases.”  
  
She rose from the piano and went to the door, taking a slim black key from her pocket and locking it, then turned and faced me with a delicately raised hand to signal me to silence. Her skirts whispered softly against the wood of the floor as she returned, taking me by the wrist, and led me to a small alcove set just to the side of the rack of violins and seated me there with herself practically upon my lap. “My dear Mister Holmes,” she whispered, her lips practically brushing my throat above my collar, “I am moved beyond words that you thought of me in my absence. If I could have cut it shorter by so much as a day, you may be sure I would have inconvenienced all the world to do it.”  
  
Even with desire burning under my skin, I resisted, glancing about the room. She had locked the only entrance, but there were still the windows, covered yet as I knew from many cases, well conducive to sound. “You are sure we won’t be observed?” I whispered, restraint failing me even as I asked.  
  
“Quite certain,” she replied as my hands settled on her hips, her back curving in such a way as to make the whole line of her body an invitation to my touch, “so long as we are discreet with our voices. It would be unwise for me to cry your name at the top of my voice, but my servants know better than to look in on me when I am keeping company with a visitor. You have missed me, then.” The thrill of delight in her voice was matched by the jump of my pulse as her hands invaded my waistcoat, caressing me through the fine fabric of my shirt, and I was for a long moment quite incapable of speech.  
  
“If I thought I could survive your exclusive attentions,” I breathed at last against the fair skin of her throat, “I might be jealous.” Not daring to disrobe her, I nevertheless abandoned myself to sensation, able to feel the heat and shape of her flesh through her garments.  
  
“If I thought you would welcome them,” she laughed against my ear as her clever fingers plundered my garments and set me trembling like the brass strings of her piano, “I should not waste them on any other recipient. You are the only man in London, my lovely detective.”  
  
In the moment those words were but fuel for the fire of my ardour, a flattering spur to passion. It was only later that I began to feel misgiving at the force of her desire and later still that I would realize that it was the very single-mindedness of her attentions that made her most dangerous to me. But all of that was for the future. For that silent, gasping span of desperation in her music room, I was quite insensible to any feeling but relief and desire. Even my fears of the last few months were quite forgotten until she lay curled upon my lap, satiated by the heavy throb of my pulse in my throat and the dazzled expression which I must, in retrospect, surely have worn.  
  
“I confess,” I murmured once the faculty of speech had returned, “to an interest in the outcome of your absence.”  
  
She laughed very softly, a silvery alto bell mingled with a feline purr, and she shifted upon me sufficiently to lift her eyes to mine in a gaze which seemed less searching that certain. “Her name is Helen, and she is very healthy. She has her father’s eyes, and misses nothing.”  
  
At once my heart was seized with an emotion so strong I could not identify its nature but only succumb to its compulsions. “May I see her?” I could not stop myself from whispering. “It is no more ridiculous or dangerous than our current position.”  
  
“As yet, it is impossible. She is at present quite inseparable from her wet nurse, and I wished to have this visit alone with you so that if your reaction was less approving, she would not suffer for it.” Olivia kissed me then, a lingering press of lips that seemed meant more to console than to arouse, and when she drew away her fingers remained pressed upon my cheek. “But I promise you, my lovely Sherlock, that you shall see her before too many weeks pass. Until then, I have some small consolation for you.” Her other hand took mine by the fingertips, guiding me to a small slit which I had not suspected in her dress which opened into a slim pocket sufficient for a single folded sheet of parchment. I unfolded it one-handed in the dim light, my fingers bereft of their customary steadiness, and upon it I found carefully sketched in charcoal the features and frame of an infant free of swaddling clothes. The child was staring with intensity at what she held in a tiny, plump fist: the slender, nicotine-and-acid stained fingers of a man - unmistakably my own - across which were laid the counterpoint of the fine, smooth and unweathered fingertips of woman. That they were Olivia’s took an observant eye to see, but mine was more than adequate to the task.  
  
The artist had drawn our hands from memory, to the smallest detail - something only Olivia could possibly have possessed the data to do.  
  
“I did not know you could draw,” I observed in a voice so distant that I only barely recall it.  
  
She laughed - that I remember clearly, a laugh so soft and intimate that it was like a touch. “A minor talent.”  
  
I shook my head once in denial of her humility. “I am moved more than a little, Olivia.” Carefully slipping the drawing into my alias’ documents case, I took her hands in my own, a gesture more domestic and sentimental than had before passed between us. “Regain your strength. I will resume our correspondence and my work. You will come and see me the moment you feel it is prudent.”  
  
“Of course.” She leaned up and pressed her lips to mine once more, unwilling to release my hands. “You will see her the moment I am able to arrange it, and as often as safety will allow. I will not have it otherwise, my darling Mister Holmes.”  
  
_She proved as good as her word, and by New Year’s Day I had seen Helen twice in secret with sufficient privacy to allow the child to see my face. She seemed to recognize me at once, gazing at me with an acuity uncanny in an infant, and then I could put names to that strange rush of feelings that seemed to rise in me upon merely seeing her: love, and pride, and a fierce protectiveness that, explain away as mere biological clockwork thought I may, has still never left me. It is a strange and haunting thing to know that one would kill men or even burn a great city to the ground if it would save the life of a single helpless organism. When I looked into Olivia’s eyes, I saw the same certainty, and I knew then that I had nothing to fear for our daughter’s safety._  
  
_It is a silent understanding that I remind myself of now, as I write, so that I will not give way to some mad impulse to fly to my daughter’s side and assure myself of her safety and well-being._  
  
_Other matters occurred in the year that followed which do not bear on this account - some recorded by my dear Watson, and some not - but I must take pains to record that it was a rare month that passed without a covert meeting with my child and that my dalliances with her mother were far more regular than that. How it was that Watson never suspected my affair, I do not know, and it shames me to admit that at the time I almost hoped he would discover it._  
  
_Almost._  
  
_One other small incident lingers heavily in my mind. Helen was a quiet child, watching all around her with those eyes so like my own and crying only when she wished to demand something of her nanny, Olivia or myself. Indeed, I had begun to fret that there was some defect of muteness in her - a concern that Olivia dismissed each time I raised it - when upon one night’s visit when I sat watching her move about her nursery with unsteady determination, some ten months after our first meeting, she turned to look at me with those piercing eyes and said in a perfectly clear voice, “Father. Come.”_  
  
_Was it because she had already learned command from her mother, or was it the simple and inexorable pull of paternal duty that brought me to her side? There is no way for me to be sure, a control subject being out of the question, but when I went to her and scooped her up in my arms she reached out and touched my face with her small hand and smiled, and then said in that same clear, sweet tone, “Good. Stay.”_  
  
_I am not ashamed to admit that that night, I slipped out just past the first true light of dawn with all the taut-nerved stealth of a thief who has overstayed his time._  
  
_Still, with the close of 1890 upon me, I was confronted by the unavoidable fact that my investigations into the nature of Professor Moriarty’s organization and profession had reached their logical destination. There was nothing left for me to do but to abandon the business or to press forward - to declare war, as it were, against the most dangerous man in London and all his blackguards._  
  
_In the end, there was but little choice. The needs of the public and my own nature would not allow me to rest so long as the man remained free to walk the streets of London, and even the tug of paternal bonds and fond sentiment could not long detain me._  
  
_Having thus resolved myself, and not wishing to put Watson or his young wife in danger, I gave him no word as to my intentions, knowing he would never listen to reason when it came to his own safety. It might have been best to do the same in Olivia’s case, but her resources were far greater than his and there was the additional consideration that it was not impossible Moriarty might learn of my connection to the Duchess and Helen. It was of the utmost necessity, then, that I see her one last time before embarking on the most complex and dangerous endeavor of my career._  
  
**2 January, 1891**  
  
I am not, as Watson has noted more than once, afflicted with any great quantity of patience. I am wont to demand that the world conform itself to the urgency of my needs, with only a little tolerance for it inconvenience, and if that is so then at least in part I feel it must be because the world only rarely has business as urgent and interesting as my own. Having sent for Olivia on this night, however, and having compounded my troubles by giving no time but simply bidding her to come as swiftly as she could, I found myself in a positive rage of restless energy. At the time, I told myself only that I was eager to be about the hunting of the greatest game of my career and impatient with the woman who barred me from that pursuit. Now I think on that fury of impatience and wonder greatly that I did not see how deeply into my flesh her barbs had already sunk.  
  
The usual distractions did nothing to calm my unrest; like a gale I swept from bookshelf to chemistry table to violin to grate, taking up objects and returning them again, never long enough to complete or even properly begin any task. My thoughts rushed ahead and back, flying in a dozen different trajectories like a pack of starving hunting hounds. I had never, before that moment, understood what was meant by the absurd figure of speech that says one can be beside one’s self. But that is precisely what I was - beside, behind, before and all about myself with the intensity of my keyed-up anticipation.  
  
“Sherlock,” she said, her softly chiding voice a break in the rattling silence of the room which was the first sign of her presence, “if you do not sit down, I shall not come in for fear of being run down as by a hansom in the street.”  
  
She was standing in the open door, the hood of her cloak cast back and her cheeks sharply shadowed in the gaslight, and I had not observed her come in. There was a key, of course - it had been quite intolerable for her to be noted by Miss Hudson at each of her comings and goings - but I am not an easy man to surprise. I assigned it to the acute excitement of my nerves at the time, another error in logic that I have but little defense for.  
  
In the light of the lamps, pale and shadow-draped and proud and tall, she was beautiful - a beauty on which I felt at that moment I might easily cut myself, given the circumstances of my summons.  
  
Smoothing my jacket, I approached the door in a manner better fitting the arrival of a guest, and offered her my hand. As we sat together on the settee I offered her my apologies.  
  
“Olivia. Do forgive my agitation.”  
  
“If I had known you were so afflicted,” she murmured, “I would not have concerned myself with the small matters of my appearance but rather raced here in the slightest gown I could have laid my hand on.” The jest did not reach her eyes, which were dark and watchful as she took in the flush of my cheeks and the lingering urgency of my manner, but all the same it calmed me - much as a horse might feel calmed, I suppose, by a sure hand upon its neck. Later I would reflect that circumstances under which I felt a kinship to a domesticated animal bore serious examination.  
  
With a sober expression, I took the lady’s hands in my own, keenly aware that it may have been for the last time. “Olivia,” I began quietly, “You know that in recent weeks I have been focusing my professional attentions on one man, a very dangerous and powerful man, with the aim of putting an end to his criminal empire.”  
  
“You have said as much, though never in so many words. I had begun to suspect that you did not intend to include me in the details of the case at all, a prospect which I assure you was quite distressing to me.” Her silk gloves were cool against my fingers, and I still do not know if that was a matter of the gloves having not yet warmed to the room or of my own flesh being so suffused with the energy of my purpose that it was heated almost to the point of fever. “You are ready to speak of it now?”  
  
In a moment of mingled sorrow and affection, I lifted my hand to Olivia’s face, brushing a lock of dark hair from her fair skin. “I had not wanted to involve you in such sordid matters, but I fear I must. My investigations have come to the point at which I cannot proceed without provoking the most vicious and deadly response.”  
  
I had, until that moment, harbored some suspicion that when confronted with the possibility of such danger to herself or to me, my lady - for that she undeniably was - would wilt with fear as is the habit of her sex. She took the news with scarcely a tremble, however, and only the slightest dilation of her pupils gave away the increase of her inner tension. “You intend to proceed in the matter with the greatest dispatch,” she said softly, and there was no question in her voice. “You have brought me here to tell me so, and to set me on my guard.”  
  
“Yes.”  
  
“This man that you speak of - he is not merely dangerous and powerful, is he?” She turned her head to brush her lips across my palm without taking her eyes from mine, the darkness of their depths searching my own gaze as if to drive my answer through with a pin and prevent any hope of its escape. “There is more, or you would not fear for us.”  
  
At this moment I would have gained my feet, gone to the table for a brandy or to the wall for my violin, reached for something to settle my thoughts. As always, I could not escape the hold Olivia had on me, or the knot she habitually made of my nerves.  
  
“He is a man of mental strength and discipline much like my own,” I told her. “The utmost care must be taken to deprive him of those small details which would be to either of us as the headlines of a newspaper. As discreet as we have been, Olivia, there has always been some small evidence of our association, and I know that my enemy would not hesitate to harm those I care for if he could but discern their identities.”  
  
“So you will not see me again until the matter is concluded.” The intensity of her gaze upon mine was so great that even this plucking of my own thoughts from my mind scarcely seemed unusual to me at the time. I had known that she was an intelligent woman, but at that moment she seemed so matched to me that it seemed only natural that she should keep pace with me like the disciplined filly beside the straining pack of bloodhounds. “You will act as though Helen and I do not exist, so that he will not perceive that through us he could do you harm.”  
  
I might then have spoken, though I know not even now what the words would have been, for I was awash in emotions with which I was so unfamiliar that I could scarce give them names. But she lifted her fingertips to my lips to stop my mouth, and she smiled, and then she drew herself up with such imperial dignity that if I had been another man I would have knelt at her feet.  
  
“Can you beat this man, Sherlock Holmes?” Her voice was that of a queen who might shake empires with a glance or bid the very ocean to grow still before her, and I could do no more or less than wonder at the strength of her.  
  
“Yes,” a voice which was my own and yet not my own - stronger, clearer, more measured and more certain that I had ever heard it before - told her softly. “I can and I shall, my Empress, though it cost me my life.”  
  
“Then go and do it,” she told me, and I felt as if - and here I curse myself as every bit as sensationalist as my dear Watson, but I can find no other words to describe the truth of the moment - as if she had touched me upon each shoulder with a sword of fire and charged me with a mission worthy of St. George. “Destroy him for me, my darling, and then return safely to us.”  
  
Bringing her hand to my lips, I nodded solemn agreement.  
  
“Good,” she told me, her lips curved in a smile that took the breath from me as she rose to her feet and strode toward the stairs, my hand still captive to the delicate grip of hers. She wasted no time or breath on more words, because no more were needed - in those dark and flashing eyes was all the command that she required.  
  
Wordless and awe-struck, I ascended the stairs to my bedchamber at the heels of my lady.


	3. Chapter 3

_When I woke in the morning, she had vanished and taken all sign of herself with her save the scent of her perfume - rosewater and saffron, as subtle as the most delicate impression of a foot upon a London street. I lingered there in my rooms one day more, on the excuse that I was putting my affairs in order, until the scent of her had faded to almost nothing._  
  
 _Then I threw on my coat and hat, pocketed my revolver, took up my cane and - as my dear Watson would say - went to war._  
  
 _Of the cut and thrust of the next months, I will record nothing here. It would be easy to lose myself in the glorious recollection of my career’s climax and to lose the thread of the matter which compels me to write this account, and in truth there is only one fact of relevance in the whole combat between myself and Professor Moriarty which bears upon this affair._  
  
 _On the fourth of May, 1891, while I lay some little way down into the gorge of the Reichenbach Falls with innumerable bruises and the broken body of my enemy beneath me, I took advantage of the opportunity to pick the pocket of Professor James Moriarty, Ph.D., who would  have no need of his little notebook in the warm environs which he now surely occupied._  
  
 _As I had suspected, the Professor had half a dozen accounts in banks strewn across Europe, all of which contained considerable sums. As there were still one or two of his gang that were still at large--as the boulders rolled down the gorge at me attested--the accounts could be of use to the Yard. As such, I made my way to the nearest bank as soon as my injuries allowed._  
  
 _I was shocked to discover that not only had the account been closed and the money removed before my arrival, but that I could make no progress in ascertaining the identity of whichever of the Professor’s associates had arranged by telegraph for the looting of the account. It was all I could do to follow the trail of the money itself, skipping from one bank to another, and more than once I nearly lost the track. But finally, in Paris, I found a clerk willing to be bought by a purse of gold and the promise of a clear conscience. It was clear at a glance that the account had been the final clearinghouse for all the Professor’s funds and that all had been removed scarcely a day before my arrival, but that was not what struck me with such force that I was barely able to stand and walk until I had fortified myself with brandy and nicotine in the gentleman’s club a few steps down the street from the bank. That honor was reserved for the sharp, fine and familiar hand in which the name of the individual who had withdrawn all the hidden funds of the dead Professor had been written._  
  
 _When I was sober enough to avoid drawing further attention to myself, I booked passage on the first boat across the channel._  
  
 **15 June, 1891**  
  
During the weeks in which I tracked Moriarty’s ill-won money, living entirely in disguise had become oddly comfortable. I changed my posture, mannerisms, voice, and features in each city, much as I had done countless times in pursuit of some criminal in London. However, this time the deception want far deeper: as far as the world was concerned, Sherlock Holmes was dead, and just as that prevented me from contacting that famous detective’s associates, it freed me to assume any identity I chose. By the time I returned to London, Mister Holmes was, in my mind, not myself but another man I had once known.   
  
Doctor Watson would have been able to tell me how unwholesome such habits of thinking were, had I shared them. But his fellowship belonged to Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street, and like that identity had expired - had, indeed, begun its decline even before that very public end. As my observations had confirmed, Watson was happy as a family man and a private physician, a life in which the dangerous pursuit of evil men had no place. The book of our association had been mere epilogue since his marriage, and with the end of Mister Holmes, the final lines had been neatly penned in and the cover closed. Even the property of Sherlock Holmes had been disposed of, placed into the care of his - of my - brother.   
  
It was a strange, exhilarating freedom, as a falcon might feel set free upon a vast and empty sky. Still, there was a detail which I could not depart London again without seeing to - which had, in fact, compelled my return to the city in spite of the added difficulties and risks of presenting even my disguised face to the streets of the great old city.  
  
Even if I had wished it, I could not break my oath to Olivia.  
  
Gaining entry into the estate was the simple, if lengthy, task of a few hours of waiting and picking locks. From the outside I had used the windows and chimneys to deduce the layout of the private rooms of the house, and soon I had concealed myself in the lady’s private sitting room. I removed my disguise and, for the first time in weeks, assumed once more my old carriage.   
  
It was but an hour or two before Olivia returned home.  
  
I heard her enter her rooms quietly, heard the soft click of her fine leather boots on the bare wood between the rugs and knew she had been out in the city, watched from the shadows of the sitting room the way that she slowly crossed it to reach her private study without lighting any of the electric lamps until she had come to the broad oak desk. There she struck a match to light a single small oil lamp set above it, and I saw her for the first time in some five months - pale but composed, her cheek sharpened and hollowed by neglect of food and rest, her gown somber but not so obvious as to suggest mourning weeds, her fingers slow to stir the waiting correspondence but still sure in their work.   
  
If it was an affectation of grief, then it was the most masterful I had ever witnessed.  
  
Unable to still my limbs, I stepped to the edge of the small pool of light, saying nothing. After learning of her involvement with my enemy I had not expected, foolishly perhaps, to feel joy at our reunion. This unwelcome happiness struggled desperately with my sense of caution and mistrust, stopping fast in my throat any words I might say.  
  
She looked up and saw me there in the lamplight, and I had then further proof of the steel of her nerve, for she neither cried out nor started at the sight of me but only smiled, though the lamp’s glow cast golden sparks in her eyes where unshed tears had welled up. “My dear detective,” she whispered, and though her voice did not tremble, it was quite husky with emotion, “I had begun to fear that you would not keep your promise after all, though I knew that you would if it were in your power. I see now that the report that no bodies were found at Reichenbach was one I was wise to put some small hope in. Shall I pour you brandy, or is there something else for which you are parched?”  
  
Her insinuations, once sultry and welcome, sounded bawdy to a man in the grip of warring emotion, and it was this dissonance that allowed me to find my voice. “Brandy, please,” I answered with a polite stoniness.   
  
Those dark eyes - darker now in the lamp’s dimness and above the bruised hollows which her makeup did but little to conceal - searched me, as if seeking some sign of feeling in the iron of my control, but at last they turned away and she rose, moving to the grate and adding more coal to the stove set in the corner before pouring a brandy for me and - as was my preference, though I rarely indulged it - warming it atop the stove for some brief moments before bringing the glass to me and offering it in both her slender, gloved hands. “Will this suffice?” she asked softly,  eyes again probing me with the discernment which had so often passed unnoticed when I had no reason to suspect her but which now seemed intrusive and dangerous.  
  
I took the glass but did not drink, instead holding her eyes. “You must be proud,” I murmured. “Only one possessed of skill, cunning and patience could so thoroughly make a fool of me.”  
  
“I do not understand your meaning,” she whispered, stepped back as if I had struck her, and I could read the unspoken endearment that died against her lips as if it were written in the air.   
  
Something that had been banked down to embers inside me caught light at that whisper, a rage I had not known I possessed, and I had smashed the crystal snifter against the wall beside us without really noticing. “You continue this, even now? Even after I chased down Moriarty’s accounts, emptied one by one mere days after his death? Even after I found your _handwriting_ in a bank ledger?” I had advanced on the lady, standing no more than a handsbreadth away and whispering words dipped in poison. I hardly recognized myself so transformed by anger. “I took the liberty of visiting the Professor’s hometown, Olivia, and I wish I could say I was entirely surprised to find he had a sister who had found a good match in Society.”  
  
“Yes.” She did not draw back from me, though if I meant to do her violence with my hands - as, indeed, I am still not sure that I did not intend - she would be but little match for me. Nor did she withdraw those fathomless eyes from me, but instead stood still and tall against the storm of my fury as if she were a stone on which wind and thunder might batter itself out. “Yes, I supposed that it was inevitable that you should know eventually. I do not deny it. I am Olivia Minerva Cavendish née Moriarty, and James was my brother. Now he is dead, and you have killed him. I shall not say this does not grieve me, but scarce a quarter-hour ago I was convinced that I had lost you both, so you will forgive me if fraternal grief is dimmed by my relief and joy.” There was pain in her voice, and now a delicate red thread of anger. “Was my background, of which you never asked and of which I never spoke, of such concern to you that you should feel a fool upon its discovery?”  
  
With a deep breath I stepped away, turning to face the window. I didn’t trust my own intentions at the moment. “For spending a year and more in intimacy with the sister of my enemy? For never wondering why you asked so little but knew so much? For being content with what I saw, carried away from reason by this, this _sentiment?!_ ”  My voice dropped to a murmur. “For these I feel a fool, Olivia.”  
  
Her hands brushed my back, feather-light and yet sure, and her own voice was the barest murmur. “What you observed was a woman whose wit was as quick as yours, whose mind ran as deep, whose affection was yours to command and whose devotion was offered to you freely. Was that not what you desired?”  
  
I turned to her again, still keeping the small distance between us. “Yes,” I answered, the hope and joy of reunion rising to the top of the fight but still hampered by bitterness. “But I should have seen that a woman as clever as you would not be content merely to manage a household and plan soirees. There is something else you are up to. Something you needed your brother’s money for.”   
  
“What I _needed,_ ” she murmured, her lip curving in the faint smile of laughter I had seen so many times upon her face and yet not observed the dry wit behind, “was that my brother's funds should not be wasted like water spilled on the dry earth. I have a use for them, yes, as surely you would find one for them if they were in your hands. But if you wished to know with what I occupy my hours and my mind, my darling, then you had only ever to ask.”  
  
Her amusement and willingness disarmed me more thoroughly than any expert fighter could have. I found my hands drifting to her waist, felt my blood respond to the warmth of her body felt through the silk of her gown. “Then tell me,” I whispered into her ear, “what does an Empress do with her time?”  
  
“Manage an empire, of course.” She bent her head to my shoulder, her lips a delicate heat above the stiffness of my collar, and her voice was almost dreamy with the laughing pleasure that seemed to set my body alight like dry wood. “It will be easier to show you than to explain, but I will ease your conscience - if you find but a single law that I have broken, I shall submit to the Yard with no word of protest. You have my word on it, my darling, my word on the lives of our children.”  
  
The words, for lack of better description, hit me with an almost physical force. Of course I had noted the possibility, but there is something about fatherhood that takes one aback. I found myself examining Olivia again, this time noting the signs of a recent birth. “Another already. What is the child’s name?”  
  
“James Michael Cavendish.” She offered me a small, half-rueful smile. “After my brother and the patron saint of guardians and detectives. It seemed a fitting memorial.” Some sign of my emotion must have shown in my eyes, because she laughed and kissed me with a quicksilver, feather-light brush of her lips across mine. “I’ve instructed the nurses that he’s to be called Michael. Respect is one thing, and tempting fate another.”  
  
I could not help but chuckle. “I’m sure you have left very little to fate.”  
  
“As little as any woman can,” she murmured, laying her head again on my shoulder. “From the look of him, he will favor you - for the best, I think. It would be ill for him to favor either of our brothers.”  
  
I wrapped her tightly in my arms, murmuring into the dark curls beside her ear. “God forbid it so,” I answered. “The world hardly needs another Mycroft.”  
  
“The one is entirely more than sufficient,” she agreed with a dryness that suggested familiarity. It was another matter I would need to pursue with her. Later.  
  
The anger had left me, and the burning energy with it, and I was suddenly so tired that it was only her warmth and nearness that kept me steady on my feet. She seemed to sense it, for her arms drew me closer to her and her voice grew firmer and more commanding. “You will come to bed,” she told me, as if issuing an order. “My husband will not be home tonight, and the servants will not disturb us.”  
  
I gave no protest, exhausted as I was and trusting completely Olivia’s rule over her domain. By the time she had laid me upon the bed and divested us both of our clothing, I was nearly asleep, but that weariness seemed to loosen my tongue even as it shadowed my eyes. “I have missed you,” I confessed.  
  
“You have been missed,” she answered, and then settled atop me and kissed me once more - first upon the lips, then my cheeks, and then my forehead as if I were one of our children. “Sleep, my darling. Tomorrow will be soon enough to consider your new life.”  
  
The deep black tide of sleep had pulled me beneath its surface before I could wonder at how she could know what the bent of my thoughts had been while I waited for her to return.  
  
 _I remember only a little of the week that followed - I suspect that exhaustion, fever and the strain upon my nerves of the previous six months finally ambushed and caught me - but if I caused Olivia any difficulty with her household, she never spoke of it to me after. By the time I was myself again - or at least, what passed for myself now that Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street had been buried, mourned and already half-forgotten - she had obtained for me a most comfortable set of rooms above Montpelier Street in Knightsbridge and a full collection of necessities, including clothing in a variety of styles and the materials by which to forge any false documents I might require. The price of these things, I did not ask and she did not volunteer. She came to me often - that much I remember, for it was rare that I should awaken and not find her beside me or sitting in the armchair near my bed with a scientific text or an account book settled in her lap._   
  
**23 June, 1891**  
  
I awakened late in the morning of the twenty-third of June, 1891, with my head clear and my limbs strong for the first time in eight days. I was alone, though the slightly askew position of the newspapers beside my bed and the still-warm tray of food and tea beside me told me that both Olivia and my housekeeper - a young woman whose name I did not yet know, but who Olivia appeared to trust - were only recently departed and likely still within my rooms. I was famished, and ate with swift efficiency, but I do not recall the meal or the tea save for their existence. They were fuel for my mind and its vehicle, no more or less. When that need had been attended to, and its complement which required the washroom (fitted, I noted, with the latest conveniences), I took a more thorough note of the garments which had been placed in readiness for me at the foot of the bed. They were quite fine, and the clothes of a gentleman of standing, but they were quite unremarkable and lacked any sign of their maker save the mute testament of his skill. I knew at once they were the work of the same man who had provided Olivia the garments in which she first came to me, and resolved to ask her his name and the precise nature of his trade at a later date. The act of dressing came naturally and swiftly, and I was pleased to find that my body answered my demands for precision and haste with little hesitation. I took a moment to examine the room further, and found it much as my clothes and the washroom were - elegant but uninformative, a place without personality and offering but little data on who might live here. Even the plaster of the walls had been deprived of history, rebuilt to a pristine quality that offered nothing but an empty canvas.  
  
My first thought, upon opening the door and passing down a spacious hallway to a sitting room of spartan but elegant adornment, was that if this was Olivia’s private retreat then I had misjudged her sorely. It was a thought that lasted a moment only, for when I saw her resting on the deep-cushioned window seat, light filtering through half of the shutter, another of her account-books on her lap and a pen in her dark gloves, her skirts pooled around her and her dark curls bound back carefully, I knew that she would not leave her domain so unmarked with her own stamp. This was not her home nor her hideaway.  
  
I understood, as my fingertips brushed the line of my lapel and then the back of one of the tidy armchairs, that it was mine.   
  
I bid Olivia a good morning, bending to kiss her, savoring again the simple warmth of her lips against mine. “Your eye for the elegantly bland is, as always, impeccable.”   
  
“I did not want to impose,” she answered, leaning up into the kiss as though she were more hungry for the contact than I was. “When you know what you wish it to be, you will change it. Until then, it will be a comfortable nothing.”  
  
Her face was still too pale, her eyes still drawn at the corners, but she looked less like a woman in mourning than she had at the start of the week. “What an appropriate phrase,” I mused. “I have myself been a comfortable nothing between Switzerland and London.  I regret the grief I have caused you, my Empress, but I am intrigued by the opportunities my apparent death has presented.”  
  
“We are not often presented with the opportunity to remake our lives to suit us,” she replied, and the edge of her mouth curled up as a fresh interest flashed behind her eyes. “I have had but one such chance, and a limited one at that. I shall not begrudge you your own. I propose that we, too, begin afresh, and that what embarrassment I may have caused Mister Holmes of Baker Street with my family connections may be buried neatly with what grief he caused me. A fair arrangement?”  
  
I sat beside her, close enough that our legs pressed together, and drew her close. “Fair and most agreeable,” I replied.   
  
I do not remember which of us placed the inkwell safely on the writing desk, though with my thoughts in such disarray it must have been Olivia. She always seemed to retain some measure of reason even in the heights of her passion, an ability that should have given rise to my envy but instead only increased how deeply enthralled I was by her.   
  
When we were finished and entangled upon the window seat with our clothes quite in disarray, her fingers wandering through my hair and my own across the softness of her skin beneath her open laces, I was reminded by the soft sound of creeping feet that we were not alone. Some of my consternation must have been obvious to her despite her closed eyes and contented purr, for she laughed into my throat and applied her teeth in a most delicate reminder of to what and who she wished me to be paying attention. “Angela is a faithful girl,” she murmured dismissively. “She knows better than to speak of or think too deeply on what she sees here.”  
  
“Most employers say that of their staff,” I remarked, noting that while there was plenty to be done, none of it required attention at that particular moment. “I expect you’ve learned to be one of the few who are correct in that regard.”  
  
“I have a great many servants,” she laughed, her lips lingering at my ear in a fashion that was most distracting to clear thought, “most of them not nearly as reliable as I would like. I take particular care with those who are.”  
  
“Mm? Oh. Nice rooms? Children attend good schools? That sort of...oh...”  It is most distressing, the way one’s thoughts seize up when engaged in amorous attentions.  
  
“That,” she murmured absently, her attentions very clearly focused upon the exact subject which was so distractingly occupying my attention, “and a keen understanding that the father of her children would likely succeed in his efforts to obtain possession of them without my protection.”  
  
I would like to be able to report that my blood ran cold or my indignation hot at the dismissive cruelty of that remark, but in truth it was but another detail in the neat ledger of what Olivia had provided for me while I decided on what my new life would contain. Sherlock Holmes might have been irritated by it, or moved by the thought of Watson’s outrage.  
  
I was pleasantly far from being Sherlock Holmes, at that particular moment.  
  
“There is something I want you to see,” she hummed into my ear when we were both entirely satiated and she was idly tidying my waistcoat with her bare, slim fingers. I smoothed her dress, entirely unnecessarily, and soon we had mounted the stairs to the upper rooms, one of which was a comfortable study full of polished furniture and electric lamps.   
  
On the handsome cherrywood table were neat stacks of ledgers, memoranda and correspondence of every kind; the state of the paper and leather bindings told me that some were over a decade old, while others still bore the faint scent of fresh paper and ink. Olivia added to one tower the book she’d been writing in that morning, and I had the impression that the placement had not been incidental.  
  
I paced about it slowly, opening a journal here and a ledger there and glancing at the neat rows of figures or the tidy shorthand in each, and then turned to her at last when I apprehended that I would have to dedicate several hours - perhaps several days - study to this miniature universe before I could grasp it.  
  
“What is this, then?” I asked, a flash of impatience driving the question from me.  
  
She only smiled. “This, my dear detective,” she murmured with the relish of a high priest initiating a talented novice, “is my empire, whole and entire. When you have finished, it will be scattered back to the four corners of the world and what copies I have made will be burnt, but by then you will see it entirely and will need only to glance at a piece to grasp the whole.”  
  
Curiosity seized me at once. Already I had pulled out a chair and was settling myself at the table. I picked up the oldest of the documents. “I’m afraid that you won’t see much of me for the next few days,” I said, the apology a reflex from years of John’s disapproval at my long plunges into the depths of a sea of facts and figures.  
  
The door already open and her voice absent with thought, Olivia laughed so softly that I nearly missed it as I perused the first column. “Of course I won’t,” she said in airy dismissal. “I shall be back on Tuesday and we will discuss it then.” I do not recall if she said anything else, or closed the door, but I remember very clearly the sense of satisfaction when I realized, some hours later, that no further apologies would be required, nor would any interruptions, save the persistent needs of the flesh.  
  
Olivia was quite right about the quality of the housekeeper as well - she was so admirably silent and efficient in her attendance on my requirements that I was able to put her entirely from my mind.  
  
 _When Olivia revealed to me her various endeavors, some as grand and far afield as the tea trade in China, some as intimate and pervasive as the ribbons adorning what seemed to be every woman’s hat in London, I came to realize that my lady was, in her own right, an Empress. At present I take pains to remind myself of the unhappy consequences of many of Olivia’s actions--legal though they may have been--but at the time I could see nothing but the size, cleverness and subtlety of the game she was playing; likewise, I felt nothing but fascination and admiration for the mind that played it._  
  
 _The death of Sherlock Holmes had given me freedom to choose a new life, and Olivia Minerva Cavendish née Moriarty had invited me not to solve but to create the largest and most complex puzzle I could imagine, as vast in scope and intricate in design as the paths of all the celestial bodies over the span of millenia. More than anything else she offered me, my lover and companion gave my mind the grist and lubrication and freedom to be constantly aflame with thought, a state I had so often sought and so often been denied - by time, by circumstances, by my own lack of vision. There was no diminishing of energies, no tiresome mundanity, and most importantly and uniquely, no boredom. My needle, my violin and my laboratory musings were abandoned unmissed._  
  
 _If I had forced myself to hear John’s voice, then, I might have grasped how terrible such a freedom could be. But John Watson had his own life now, and I would have mine - a life as fitted to my specifications and congenial to my temperament as domestic tranquility had proved to his._  
  
 _My Empress would see to that._


	4. Chapter 4

“Again, the devil took him to a very high mountain and showed him all the kingdoms of the world and their splendor. ‘All this I will give you,’ he said, ‘if you will bow down and worship me.’” - _The Gospel of Matthew, Chapter Four, Verses Eight and Nine._

* * *

 

**16 July, 1891**

I was engaged in a thorough examination of the London papers when Olivia entered my private study, her hair and the lace of her dress still softly damp from the evening rain, and I was appreciatively aware of the way the modern electric light of the room cast her in a delicate filament of shadows. It had not been the habit of Sherlock Holmes to notice who or what might disturb him while there was reading to be done, but Olivia had been an exception then and was an exception now.

“You have made some changes,” she noted mildly, her eyes flicking over the room and then my person with inquisitive intensity.

She was referring, of course, to the new persona I had adopted. After much reflection and no little experimentation, I had decided that most of my time outside the townhouse was to be as Graf Nikolai Alexandrovitch Naryshkin, Russian aristocrat, industrialist, and dabbler in inventions. My hair now reached my jawline, bleached a convincing sandy blonde and combed back with pomade to keep it out of my eyes, while my neatly-trimmed beard received the same colour treatment. A combination of heavier meals, more vigorous exercise, and cunning padding sewn into my jackets made the Graf appear much larger than Sherlock Holmes ever had, and the lifts in my shoes made him a truly imposing figure indeed. My careful mannerisms I could keep without fear of recognition, for a man of power and size hardly needed bluster to command respect.

The housekeeper had, exactly as I instructed, sent for a number of Russian housewares and decorations. Among a few bleak landscapes and brightly-painted vases, Ivan Kramskoy’s _Portrait of a Woman_ stood out from its place of honor directly behind the desk in the study. The subject of the work was young, dressed almost entirely in black, and looked down at the viewer from her chaise carriage with an expression of cool appraisal, as if she’d been interrupted in her travels and was trying to decide if the person standing before her was worth her time.

It reminded me unaccountably of Olivia, and therefore delighted me.

“You will be quite memorable,” she mused as she finally entered the room fully, her fingertips stopping here and there to touch some new accent or bit of decor which was suitable for the private study of a man like Nikolai Alexandrovitch, but now that they had finished their survey her eyes seemed entirely devoted to the study of my person. “That will be useful - a man who makes a striking impression is unlikely to be compared to another.” She shifted to Russian with a subtle shift of her head and shoulders, as if the language and the more regal posture were one and the same. “You are still very beautiful, my darling, but I will miss the feel of your bones under my fingers.”

Replacing the pen in its finely-wrought cup, I stood, smiling and opening my arms. “Do not fear, my Empress,” I cajoled as I kissed her gloved hand, drew it under my jacket, and placed her fingers against my collarbone beneath the padding. “They are still in their place.”

Her smile of delight was private and vivid, and entirely adequate compensation for the minor discomfort of the tailoring. “Still perfect,” she laughed, as she leaned up enough to allow me to bend and kiss her comfortably, “and still the only man in London.”

The kiss lingered, and for a while we neither spoke nor disturbed our surroundings with the urgency of desire. It was not a lack of heat that stilled us, nor a lack of conversation, but a strange and simple comfort which required no satisfaction to provide contentment. At last, after perhaps five minutes, she lifted her head from my shoulder and murmured against my ear, “I have a small salon this evening which I think will please you - men of any number of disciplines, all of considerable intellect, and the financiers who seek to winnow out the ideas which will give them the most profit. It will be positively brimming with opportunity, and will make a fine introduction to Society for you. Besides which,” and here her lips touched my throat again lightly, “it will provide an excellent excuse for you to call on me until late in the evening, and once you are in the house it will be a mere nothing to provide you as much time with Helen or Michael as you may desire.”

I smiled as we parted. “As always, dear lady, you have thought of everything.” Collecting a few journals and books from the shelves, I inquired as to further details. “Will you be presenting me under guise, or will we give that task to another?”

“Another, I think. I shall be the charmed hostess, entirely taken with you and eager to present to you everything which I think may catch your attention. The fellow presenting you will not know he is doing it for me - he thinks it a favor for a man in a banking concern to whom he owes more than a small sum of money - and will likely think he has put himself into further trouble by putting us together. I expect it shall be entertaining.” Her lips curved as she contemplated his discomfort, a feline delight gleaming in her eyes. “I may even have too much brandy.”

Unable to help myself before her wicked excitement, I laughed. “You are completely devious, Olivia. If I wouldn’t hate them simply for trying, I’d almost feel sorry for anyone foolish enough to cross you.”

“My darling,” she breathed, her own laughter joining mine in a giddy rush of delight, “the things you say! Tonight will be a complete pleasure - I have no doubt of it.”

“Your husband?” I inquired, without any particular urgency. A more decent man might have felt a qualm at the social humiliation I was about to ensure for a fellow I did not even know, but Nikolai was anything but a decent man.

“In the country with his mistress.” Olivia’s disdain was a tangible thing in the air before she waved it away with another cruel, beautiful smile. “I imagine he will be quite put out.”

A wicked smirk of my own pulled at my lips. “Is she that boring?”

“You would find her so.” The disdain returned, honed to a chill edge, though it did not banish that smile from her lips. “My husband doesn’t have enough wit to be bored with something vaguely lovely that will fellate him on command.”

While I laughed at Olivia’s shamelessness, some small part of me felt bittersweet.  Though it had been more than two months since I had seen him last and nearly two years since we’d lived together, I could see and hear in my mind, very clearly, the mortified offense that Doctor Watson would take at such a crude remark. His virtues had sometimes made tiresome demands on my behavior, but now, for the first time, I missed them.

Still, it was but a fleeting moment, and soon I was enjoying Olivia’s company once more. I had familiarized myself with her empire, and now we talked of business. There were several steel mills I wished to place in my own ledger which would require a delicate approach, the family which now owned them having a significant sentimental attachment, and she was able to offer me several very helpful suggestions for how I might allow them to preserve the illusion of ownership while retaining for myself both the control and profit of the enterprise. It was an art in which she had a great deal of skill and practice - indeed, the great bulk of her empire was held in the hands of others upon whose strings she could tug with a single note or telegraph - and one at which I was still a gifted novice. When I was satisfied on the matter, we discussed Go and the latest news from America, and then I made the suggestion that surely one of her operations would run more smoothly if she were to take in hand some member of the government service. It had a most unexpected and electric effect upon her, for she stood very suddenly from the corner of my desk and set her brandy down so sharply that the glass rang, just audibly.

“That would be very foolish of us, my darling,” she told me, her eyes dark and fierce. “Surely you can see why, if you but apply a little thought.”

I watched her expression and posture intently. “Surely someone clever enough to write innocuous reports could be found. My brother cannot own all of them.”

“Your brother has a particularly keen nose for ‘innocuous’ reports, as you would know if you had bothered to make a study of him.” Her expression softened slightly under my attention, as if my eyes made her aware of her own tension, but the lingering sharpness beneath the surface did not fully vanish - a tiger’s claws tucked back into the hollow of the paw, but not yet completely retracted. “I leave the functioning of the civil service very strictly alone, and your brother remains pleasantly blind to the idea that there could be any other board upon which the game might be played. I went to a great deal of trouble once to ensure that he should not think twice of me, my lovely man, and I should not like to have that effort wasted.”

The edge in her voice suggested that the particular troubles she had gone to had been very great indeed; Olivia wasn’t one to avoid the work needed to invest in her empire, so there must have been something beyond mere expenditures of energies.

I stood and went to her, laying my hand gently on her shoulder. “I am happy to look elsewhere for footholds, my dear, but this seems to have upset you beyond your usual temper.”

She looked up at me then, and now it was my turn to read facts in the twitch of her lip and the subtle shift away from my hand, the sharpening of her breath and the controlled spasm of her throat that marked a reflexive and cutting remark snapped off before it could be spoken. Dilation in the eyes, small spike in the pulse - fight or flight reflex kicking in, but not tightly enough to be an immediate trigger. Secondary effect. A memory.

Uncharacteristic of my previous life, but becoming almost commonplace in my new existence, a fury rose up in my blood. Even as it pumped unnecessary strength into my limbs and contorted my features into an animalistic grimace, my mind somehow still catalogued the details of Olivia’s realization, fear, and anger. My fist collided with the wall immediately beside her head, cracking the plaster and casting its dust into her hair.

“I fail to see,” I assailed, almost biting the words, “The purpose of lying down for him when you’ve so carefully hidden your influences anyway!” Whirling away from her, I faced the window, my mind’s eye besieged by imagined scenes I wanted neither to see nor remember. I considered going out onto the street where she could not follow without attracting attention.

“I was very young,” she said in a voice like brittle glass, “young enough to have nothing but a good marriage and my brother’s knowledge as my tools. Your brother sees everything in London and more, but he does not always observe. He disdains women, and he does not question his conclusions once made. So I saw to it that he concluded that I was everything he despises in my sex - foolish, empty-headed, easily gulled and secretly wanton. It accomplished its purpose.”

What she said of Mycroft was true, of course--the only woman he’d ever respected had been our mother. To my discredit, I had held similar attitudes before meeting Irene, and even she had not dispelled my prejudices entirely.

My hands clenched and pressed against the windowsill, it seemed that my reason was still the victim of my sense of decency, weak though it was.

No, that wasn’t right. It was not moral outrage but an intimate, personal wound. Even though it had been years ago, long before we had become lovers, the idea that Olivia would use her affections as a tool, and on my brother, no less, inflamed an avaricious possessiveness in me I had only briefly experienced before. It stalked through me, flinging open doors in my mind to thoughts I had always thought the province of men less rational than myself, conjuring doubt as to how many men had shared her affection and to what purposes, reminding me that the husband of whom she spoke with such contempt must surely have enjoyed them once to gain the children she had borne _him_ , replaying again and again the moment that John had broken to me that he might soon join me no longer in my investigations because he had taken a bright young wife.

I still do not know why this last struck most keenly of all, but I have promised myself to make a faithful report to this page and so I must confess that it did.

She had not left the room, though I am sure that my fury must have been apparent to her. She had not moved at all, in fact, but remained still and erect with her eyes upon me and her breath a soft whisper in the still air almost lost in the bellow of my own lungs. “I remember,” I said, and the words grated in my throat, “that you said you would not waste your attentions on any other.” The sentiment smacked of weakness, almost of pleading, no matter how harsh its expression.

I despised it, and yet could not tear it from me.

“I have not,” she replied, her own voice free of any hint of the pity or remorse which might have driven me to flee altogether, “in two years and longer.”

I turned on her, and though I must have been quite transported by the violence of my emotion, she did not draw back but offered me her hands instead, palms upturned, and the tablet of her eyes from which to read. It took me long heartbeats to master myself sufficiently, but when I was calm again and could see her clearly, the truth of it remained written there for my perusal.

“Olivia,” I said at last, “you move my mind to such heights, and yet you drive me to passions I did not know I possessed.”

She laughed then, a soft and generous sound which laid any thought of her anger to rest, and then opened her arms to me. “You must not chide yourself for it,” she told me, a smile bright upon her lips as she lifted them in invitation. “It flatters me. You may be as jealous as you please.”

Folding myself in her embrace, I exhaled a snort. “Heaven forbid. It must be the most irrational of all emotions.”

“No, my darling, that would assuredly be hope.” Her fine skin was warm against mine, and her hands were already tracing my buttons. “Have we have time for dalliance before our evening’s business? You have, I confess, most keenly whetted my appetite.”

Glancing at the polished brass mantle clock, I smiled into her hair. “I can never refuse you, my Empress,” and with the rage-born strength of the moment I swept her up into both arms and carried her through the doorway. I had, after all, a fine new Russian bed with a great brass frame which had not yet been christened and upon which, I was certain, the spill of her hair and the curve of her pale skin would be the perfect ornament.

I was, of course, entirely correct.

_I could, if I were of a masochistic disposition, recount the three years that followed in the most exquisite and excruciating detail. They were ecstatic, ceaseless and exhilarating in their motion, in the way that we swept across the world to address this fascinating difficulty or that intriguing opportunity with decisive energy or worked the secret webs of finance and influence from our parlor by telegram and letter between bouts of ardent passion. That I do not do so is not so much to spare myself their memory, as they rarely leave my mind any more than the recollection of the sweet excitement of my cocaine bottle does, but in the interests of brevity. If I were to take down all the tricks and bluffs of the Berlin Conference or the intricacies of the silent takeover of Vickers, Sons and Company, I might well become so preoccupied that all else worthy in my sphere would go untended._

_So the exploits of Nikolai Alexandrovitch Naryshkin will go unwritten, as perhaps they should, but one incident during that time must be considered. It was not, after all, the proper business of the Graf at all but instead that of the late Sherlock Holmes which moved me upon that occasion...._

 

**May 19th, 1893**

If my dear friend had been recounting the story of his wife’s funeral, he would, I expect, have remarked upon the fresh brightness of the spring morning on which she was buried, so incongruous was it with the heavy grief borne by all who knew her. Nearly a hundred mourners wound their way through the long paths and hedgerows of Highgate to the burial site. All was shaded by oak and beech trees just begun to leaf out, and here and there among the tombs grew the first pale crocus-blossoms of the season. A few clouds scuttled across the sky, throwing the scene into periodic brightness and dazzling those in attendance except for the unflinching Doctor Watson himself, whose eyes seemed to look upon a landscape unseen by others.

I had not meant to come, had even told myself quite firmly when I set out that morning from the rooms in which Olivia and I had spent the night before that it was not my purpose to intrude upon my dear Watson’s grief, for surely I had passed from his life in these last two years as completely as he had passed from mine. Yet without my assent my feet turned toward Holloway, as if my whole body had turned traitor and propelled me to the very gates of the churchyard. I hesitated there for some time, struggling with myself, until I saw the mourners begin to pass and could restrain myself no longer. I fell in among them, casting my eye about for Watson, and soon found him near the head of their number, just behind the pallbearers. He walked tall and straight in spite of the old injury, which I could plainly see pained him, and he looked neither to the left nor to the right as he made his solitary march up that gentle, sloping hill to the cemetery.

The funeral train passed the entrance of the Egyptian Avenue, the grand mausoleums of the monied, the finely-hewn marble statues of angels, arriving at last at the open grave waiting beside a row of Celtic crosses. A while slab, marbled with rose quartz and carved with what I could only suppose was a favorite poem, awaited the internment. As the mourners gathered around, the wind again swept the clouds away, and the crystal in the gravestone refracted the sun, throwing out beams in a hundred directions. This I saw with only half an eye, for my attention was as focused on my dear Watson as was practical. When the pinkish light hit his face, I was surprised to see him smile, an expression so sorrowful and yet so familiar that it threatened to undo my resolve to remain hidden.

The late Mrs. Watson’s dearly beloved listened tearfully to the eulogy delivered by Mr. Morstan, Watson’s brother-in-law, and the service given by the solemn priest. I recall none of it save for my friend’s sorrow.

Then the pall bearers began to lower the casket into the earth, and the bereft doctor fell to his knees, one hand trembling on the pine lid before it sunk below reach. I took an involuntary step towards him, arrested by the glances of the crowd my own misgivings. How I wanted to offer a word of condolence! How I longed to stand beside my grieving friend and lend him my strength in a time of such pain! Yet I could not move nor speak, no matter how much my passions were stirred to do so. There was another holding Watson by the shoulder to keep him from tumbling into the earth with his late wife; there was another helping him to his feet, offering him a handkerchief to dry his eyes.

He bore it with such strength, with such quiet dignity, and when he bent to gather a handful of earth and cast it on the casket - the wooden box which held not only his wife but his newborn son - I felt tears on my cheeks in spite of pride and prudence. I stood there staring at the broken earth, at the stone, as if his grief was so great that I was staked in place by it, until at last the mourners began to disperse and the gravediggers set to their work. He gave me no glance but one - curious and distracted, but without recognition - and when he passed back down under the shade of the trees in the company of his friends and her family, I could not move myself to follow nor to depart. I stood instead, stock still and rooted in the earth, and listened to the shovels scrape and the broken patter of the soil piled upon itself.

After a while, it began to rain.

I do not now recall how I returned from Highgate, though I must have engaged the service of a hackney, or how I brushed past Olivia’s servants to come to the nursery in which Helen and Michael slept in spite of the hour having grown late and the streets dark. I was so distracted by the thought of Watson’s grief, of how the years in which I had not seen him had changed my dear friend, that it was only the touch of Olivia’s hands upon my shoulders that stirred me from my fugue and brought me again to myself.

“My darling,” she murmured, her eyes shining like two opals in the dim gaslight as she knelt to take my hands in hers, “you have stained your face with tears. Will you not tell me what has happened?”

“I have been reminded of the passage of time, and of all its casualties,” I told her in a voice that was more stone than breath. It was entirely in keeping with her nature that she did not flinch from me but instead bent to draw my gloves from my hands and lay the most delicate kisses upon the nicotine stains and thin white scars that marked them, but still it surprised me, and I must have given some small gasp or sigh because she left off her work upon them to look up at me and smile.

“Nothing will harm our children, my love,” she promised me, and her determination shone in her face like the glint of a candle from the edge of a fine sword. “Nor you or I, if it is in my power to prevent it.”

In that moment I was both very glad for her affection and determined that she would not know of Watson’s effect on me, for I wished to keep the secret of our accord from her. I wish I could say that it was with some premonition of danger, some wish to keep him safe from her that drove me to the omission, but the motivation was baser: it was mine, and precious to me, and I was as grasping of it as a miser with his gold.

Drawing her close in a firm embrace, I allowed our mutual passions to burn away the day’s secret sorrows.

 

_I would like to pretend that it was the thought of Watson suffering alone in the absence of his wife which moved me to reflect upon my situation with Olivia and repent, but the calendar and the facts - which are far harsher judges than any man’s conscience - do not bear me out. The whole of 1893 passed away without any change in my conduct, and when I first became interested in the murder of Ronald Adair in the spring of 1894 it was not with any thought but that of my own amusement. Indeed, my first recollection of the matter was of trading the paper containing the news with my Empress across a dining table in France where we had been discussing how best to leverage the year’s wine production and her off-handed remark that it would not have required a very clever man to arrange such a thing, but merely a meticulous one with a steady hand. I suggested at once that we should take a wager to see who could put the matter to rest first, but she dismissed it with a laugh - there were far more interesting matters in hand, she said, than a simple shooting._

_But I could not lay the matter so easily to rest - it preyed upon my mind like an unsolved equation until at last I prayed her forgiveness and kissed her before setting out for London again. She only laughed and told me that it was my own affair, and that I must do as pleased me - it was never her nature to deny me any entertainment which I might desire. It was only a matter of two days to be in London, and then I was upon the track. It was a week’s work to fetch out all the details, to identify from the bullet the weapon which had fired it and thence to realized that the murder had been done by none other than Sebastian Moran. It came upon me as a terrible, searing fury that this man - who had been so close to Moriarty, who had perhaps had the temerity to shoot at me - had been at liberty in London for three years because I could not be troubled to think of him. I was in the midst of plotting how best the matter could be attended to without my direct involvement, though it galled me that he would not see my face and know his accuser, when I came upon my friend Watson making inquiries in Park Lane and knew at once that he must be in danger. Without the slightest hesitation - without, indeed, any thought but for the task in front of me - I showed myself most provocatively to one of Moran’s lookouts and then went at once to Baker Street to enlist Mrs. Hudson as my assistant for contacting the police. A wax likeness of myself, obtained on the Continent for Olivia’s amusement, would serve as my decoy._

_But there was the possibility that Watson would draw further attention to himself, and so I did what was most certain to keep him from trouble - I went to him in my own person and pressed upon him the most outrageous fictions about my daring escape from the ravine and pursuit of Moriarty’s gang across the wide world, so that he did not stir from his chair until nine o’clock and only then in my company. We passed to Camden House, and all the particulars of what passed between us and the police and Sebastian Moran that night are no doubt soon to be published in another of Watson’s little reports._

 

**April 4, 1894**

Bidding my friend good night, I took up a discreet vigil at my window and waited until the sound of his footsteps no longer reached my ears, and then still until the lamplight of Baker Street shone upon his retreating figure for the last time. Immediately I took up my own coat and hat and added a hastily-applied false mustache and unnecessary spectacles. Then, concealing a few weapons about my person, I positioned the wax dummy once more before the curtains.

Mycroft’s elegant townhome was, of course, very close at hand to the Diogenes Club and Parliament. Even in disguise I was loath to approach from the street in full view, but it was hardly difficult to make my way through London by the back alleys and little-used streets.

My brother’s staff was polite despite the hour, and so well-trained that they did not register surprise at my presence. I removed my disguise and had but to wait in the library for his arrival which, slow and reluctant as ever, was still as inevitable as sunrise.

“Sherlock,” he complained as he laboriously made his way to his favorite chair, “you know that I despise being roused from bed.”

I inclined my head. “Apologies, dear brother. Needs must.” A small smile curved my lips. “I am glad to see that you remain as you were.”

“And you have put on some seven pounds of muscle, obtained two new scars in the region of your hips and been to Tangiers in the last fourteen months.” Myrcroft settled himself into his chair and looked at me quite crossly. “I trust you have enjoyed your holiday?”

My mood sobered. During all I’d done with Olivia in the previous three years, our own enjoyment and profit had been the paramount focus of our attention, after the children. Sometimes before. Yet thinking of that now drew a tightness around my chest that I could not shake from me. Was it, at last, shame for our wickedness? Or was it no more than being reminded of those I’d left behind?

“Yes,” I answered, my voice subdued. “I have.” I performed an examination of my own, then: the cut and quality of his dressing gown, the new grey hairs, the calluses on his right index finger - they all indicated that he had, indeed, been continuing on much as before, even as Time wore at him.

“There is a great deal of work for you to do, then. I am sure you will begin attending to it promptly. But you would not be waking me up in the middle of the night to tell me things you could tell me by post. You want me to agree to a favor.” My brother is a large man long since given over to the logical results of his natural sloth, but that does not prevent him from directing the most reptilian expression I have ever seen outside the faces of the Moriarty siblings on those who waste his time. Myself, in that particular moment.

“I would owe you much if you would help me corroborate an entertaining fiction I created tonight. Enough evidence to fool a clever novice, were one to look.” And, though his misplaced trust in me was complete, my good doctor was a curious man and one who needed to see things for himself before a statement became utterly true in his mind. It was, I am ashamed to say, a quality of his that I had taken advantage of before, though never for lies of the scale I had told that evening.

I slid an envelope across the table to Mycroft. Notes of my ‘adventures’ I’d taken down while waiting at the window. “You need only send me the sum of expenses, and I will repay you in full.”

“With what, precisely?” My brother’s voice was not so much curious as amused. “You are, after all, quite dead and your property disposed of. Most of it to me, which was slightly unexpected.”

A small measure of good humor returned to me. “You are family, after all, and dear to me, though I will be the first to say I am terrible at acting like it.” I closed a hand briefly on his shoulder, then shrugged. “Feel free to return my property less the cost of this favor, or free to keep it. I have found that a ghost can do quite well for himself, if he has the right mind and disposition.”

“Curious.” He studied me again with half-lidded eyes, as if trying to ferret out where exactly I had found funds enough to be casual with them, and then folded his hands. “I suppose I will return them - I’ve little enough use for them - and take care of your favor as well. I take it that Doctor Watson will be rejoining you at Baker Street?”

A breath somewhat sharper than typical betrayed my surprise. “I...have not resolved to return.”  

Odd though it may seem, I had believed, until that point, that I would take care of Watson and a few other things in London and then return to Paris and my life with Olivia. My brother’s question revealed my uncertainty, and the conflict in my breast that had been brewing all evening.

Would I return to life as Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective? Or remain a ghost playing endless games of power and secrets?

My uncertainty sharpened my brother’s gaze until it was as piercing as a stiletto probing at fine armor and searching for a weak point. “What else could be your interest, brother, if not attending to the criminal classes of London with your Watson in tow?”

I had the strangest impulse to tell him everything, then, the mistress and blackmails and bastard children, all of it. Perhaps I will tell Mycroft, someday. If any man’s measure of me were to remain undamaged by the whole of it, it would be my brother’s.

“A world of puzzles enough to keep me thinking for the rest of my life,” I said only. “Yet...”

Yet Mycroft had struck at the heart of the matter. My Empress was my equal and in some aspects my superior, driving me to higher and higher excellencies of thought and skill through companionship and competition both. Watson was only clever enough to understand my explanations and to make the occasional unassisted deduction, but was by far a better man than I.

A year before in London, on business with my Empress, I had seen a demonstration for a gasoline-driven engine which one of the exhibitors claimed could be used to drive great factories in stamping out precisely manufactured machinery of all sorts. It struck me as fascinating, then, to imagine how relentlessly such a production line might proceed without any regard to the nature of what was being produced. I had not thought of Watson at the time but then, in my brother’s sitting library, it occurred to me that he would not have approved of it in the slightest.

Just as he would not have approved of my own perfectly driven activity of the last three years.

Had I been given the choice, I would have dismissed the fact as irrelevant and gone back to Paris at dawn. But no matter the concentration I gave over to the effort, no matter the increasing fury in my blood, the image of Watson’s disappointment and horror held me fast. It should not have been so. A single anchor does not hold back an ironclad, but somehow one man’s principles were stronger than the steel and steam engines of my will.

“Damnation.” I cursed the wall of Mycroft’s parlour, where I had left a modest indentation with my fist. A light smear of blood colored the wallpaper, and the bandage I was going to need for my knuckles would require me to acquire a larger glove.

I can count the number of times I have heard my brother even mildly surprised upon the fingers of one hand, but that day was one of them. “Sherlock,” he said, his voice rising ever so slightly in pitch, “whatever _have_ you been doing?”

“‘Now my charms are all o'erthrown,” I recited, smiling bitterly, “and what strength I have's mine own, which is most faint.’”

He sniffed softly. “Really, Sherlock. Love? How sentimental. And if you don’t wish to tell me, you could simply say so.”

It was odd that what I felt then was not outrage and shame at my Mycroft’s barbs. He had often leveled accusations of sentiment at me throughout our upbringing, and for my devotion to logic and clarity of mind I had always felt the lesser for it. Yet in that moment his words washed over me and away, as they would if a child had accused me of age. “It is best for all if you don’t know the details,” I answered. “But suffice it to say that in three years, I was never afflicted by boredom. But it is done, and I will be returning to Baker Street.”

Staring at me for some time as if I were a particularly peculiar specimen having produced no results, Mycroft shrugged his corpulent shoulders in feigned disinterest. “I suppose you will be pleased to know that I ordered the premises left undisturbed until I could get around to inspecting them,” he said, “and that it will only take a few letters to accommodate your favor. Still, Sherlock, you might have spared me the work by not being dead in the first place....”

_I will - I must - close here. What more is there to say? I have done what I have done, and I cannot leave Watson again when his relief at seeing me is so great. I will consign these notes to the fire and allow Mycroft’s artful elaborations of my hasty fictions to pass as truth. I will be Sherlock Holmes again._


	5. Chapter 5

“Holmes,” Watson called from the base of the stairs, “there is a woman to see you. She says she has a matter for your attention.”

I made no answer until I had finished dissolving the arsenic into the solution. It was not the most delicate of chemical analyses, but care was required nonetheless.

“A moment,” I replied through the door. “I’ve one more solution to prepare before I can leave the experiment.” Thinking no more of visitors, I reached for the next beaker.

He made some childing remark about my manners, I am certain, but I paid it no heed. Let Mrs. Hudson make tea and Watson serve it, and whatever fair flower of London might have wandered through my door this time cool her heels. Perhaps her problem would prove worth taking up, and perhaps not - it would wait until I had finished my work.

At last the last piece of the Ruston murder was proved possible, and I took the time to wash my hands clean - something Watson never ceased to chide me for forgetting - before sweeping my jacket back about my shoulders and proceeding to the sitting room at an energetic pace. I was most excited by the potential of my new process, and perhaps I would take the time to explain it to Watson before turning my attention to the interloper who had called upon us.

I remember very clearly that it was the sight of Olivia’s dark curls and her slim fingers upon the teacup she was accepting from Watson which alerted me to her presence.

At the threshold of the parlour I stopped short, frozen in place by all that remained unsaid between my Empress and myself. It should not have surprised me so; our rooms on Baker Street were common knowledge, and even if they hadn’t been, no one was more skilled at learning secrets than Olivia. My hopes for a clean break had been more clouding to my mind than I had feared.

“Your Grace, forgive him - he is often distracted. Holmes,” Watson rebuked me in his gentle, patient fashion, “aren’t you going to greet our guest?”

Olivia’s lips curved at the edges, and I am sure Watson mistook the expression for a very pleasant smile, but I knew her too well not to see the cruelty in it. “Please, Doctor Watson, do sit down,” she told him in the silken tones I had so often heard her use to bend others to her will, “and do not trouble yourself to remonstrate with him. I am sure that Mister Holmes will join us in his own time.”

Unsure if it was my own will or Olivia’s that propelled me forward, I stepped into the room, offering a bow. “I am truly sorry for keeping you waiting, my Lady, and any pains it may have caused you,” I apologized, allowing my true regret to reach my eyes.

“It is a small matter,” she said with the slightest wave of her hand, her eyes fixed upon mine like a falcon’s upon the pigeon it intends to make its meal. “I have come on an errand too important for a mere bit of inconsiderate behavior to warrant more than a mention.”

Watson straightened at once, his expression intrigued. “A very great matter, then!” he exclaimed.

“Yes. Very important, and very personal.” Olivia paused to sip her tea, her eyes shifting from my own to Watson’s face and making a slow, thorough inventory of him before she offered her gaze to me again. “I trust you are both men of discretion?”

“You can rely on me,” my dear friend assured her, “and upon Mister Holmes, to the utmost extremity.”

My jaw tightened. My dear Watson was not a stupid man, but there were times when his blindness was painful, if only because I dreaded the moment when it was lifted. One day he would see me for the man I was.

In this case, I was also grateful for what he did not observe.

“Of course, Madam,” I replied tersely.

“I must insist, Doctor Watson, that you give me your word. No mention of what passes between the three of us shall ever be spoken of to another, nor recorded in your notes or your little stories.” For a moment, I could not speak, for the imperious authority of Olivia’s voice was of the sort that had so often commanded my passions in her bed and the sudden understanding of the trap which she had laid for him was so astonishing that I could not help marveling at it.

A moment was all that she needed, for my dear Watson answered her at once with all his solemn dignity. “Your Grace,” he assured her, “I will speak not a word of it to anyone, and it shall never receive the least mark from my pen.”

“Good.” She signaled her acceptance with a flash of her ivory teeth, their sharpness catching the light beneath the red of her lips. “I accept your oath.”

In that moment I despaired that I had not stopped Watson from swearing loyalty so readily to an unknown secret, one that could rob him of his integrity or his health or do him any number of evils. I turned a grave stare at Olivia.

“My affair is of the greatest importance,” she began, her voice somber in spite of the flashing anger which I could see so clearly in her dark eyes, “for it concerns a man who I wish the two of you to find for me. It must be done quietly, and with the utmost discretion, for this man is not my husband. I trust that the two of you understand?”

Watson grew pale, but nodded. I felt my own jaw set, and it was necessary to fold my hands to hold back the urge to physically restrain her from continuing. I saw at once what she meant to do, of course, but there was no means by which I could stop her from speaking which would not seem to Watson to require an explanation. So I said nothing, did nothing, and she spoke on.

“I first made his acquaintance some years ago, and I was at once smitten. I do not much blame myself in this, for he was a man of such great force and mental powers as any woman might desire, and if he is not the fairest man in London then I may say in truth that he yields but little to any I know. It was thus easy for him to obtain my confidence, to seduce me, to induce me to betray my husband.” She was watching Watson now, and though he could not see it, I knew she must be enjoying the shock that played up on his face. “We were intimate, not only once but many times, and eventually I found that I was pregnant with his child. I was so enamoured of him that even this did not dissuade me, and I confess that I even took pleasure and pride in the fine mind that I was sure his daughter would inherit from him. We continued as lovers for some time longer, right up until the winter of 1891, and by this time I had put myself almost entirely into his hands - though neither of us knew it, I was even carrying a son for him. It was with the most lamentable shock, then, that I discovered that summer that he had been involved in the murder of my brother.”

At this, Watson started, a look of horror and sympathy on his face. “Good God,” he murmured. “For you to be at the mercy of such a depraved villain!”

Olivia bowed her head in a masterpiece of sorrow, twining her fingers together in her lap and continuing in a soft voice. “My brother was not a kind man, Doctor Watson, nor a man without faults. Still, my lover had hounded him from every refuge before his death and I surely ought to have been warded against his touch by righteous anger. But when he came to me and spoke to me again, I found that I could not resist him even with my brother’s blood fresh upon his hands, and so I allowed myself again to fall under his influence. Indeed, I yielded to it even more thoroughly than I had before - I went so far as to give him the run of my accounts and my purse, to appear with him in public, to allow him to humiliate my husband in front of me. I suppose you must think very poorly of me, Doctor Watson, to allow myself to be ruled so by my affections?”

I closed my eyes, unable to face the righteous fury in the set of Watson’s jaw, but I knew him too well not to recognize it in the gruff timbre of his voice. “The offense, Your Grace,” he told her gallantly, “surely has been punished many times over by your suffering. It is for this devil to answer for it, and not for you.”

Save for the fact that the seduction involved had been Olivia’s, she told no falsehoods in her account, and in her speech and expression portrayed so perfectly the upstanding lady led into villainy that no one who heard her would doubt her sincerity. Even in my despair at seeing Watson’s rightful outrage at my actions, I could not help but be impressed by the Lady’s skill in lying so well with so many facts, and in exacting her revenge so elegantly. To play the wronged woman and turn Watson’s revulsion on me was a gambit of skill and cunning I could not have anticipated before that moment.

I cast my eyes over her, searching for some sign of malice or cruel satisfaction, and could find nothing until I came to her fingertips resting upon her wrist and recognized the motion as her habitual signal that she had finished one of her chess moves. _Your play, my dear detective,_ the trace of her fingers over her pulse whispered.

“Holmes,” Watson said, his voice still stiff with indignation, “have you nothing to say?”

Turning to face my friend, I saw in his expression that noble decency of character that so endeared him to me, that decency which now demanded a moral horror of my own. No matter the numerous times I’d tried to show him my own coldness--that while I understood the rules of propriety, I had no visceral feelings regarding them--he would persist in his belief that I was not simply a man of great intellect but, despite my own convictions, a good man.

“It is a sordid matter from start to finish,” I answered him honestly, “and I confess I am not unmoved by her plight. But my sense of decency will be best satisfied, I think, if we bid her return to her husband and forget this ill-starred association.”

She turned her eyes on me, then, and though she did not drop her mask of slighted honor, I knew she was speaking to me as much as for Watson’s benefit. “I cannot part from him so simply, Mister Holmes, for he still has my heart and the hearts of my children, not to mention the run of all my affairs. How am I to return to my husband with all that left unaccounted for?”

Watson’s expression turned pained at the bald vulnerability and need in Olivia’s question, and I felt a growing sense of danger--for if we continued in such a fashion, surely my friend would deduce that the villain of the Lady’s tale was none other than his colleague, flatmate, and friend.

If he would stay such very long, after discovering such a long string of evil deeds. I can only suppose that that was Olivia’s aim, if not to simply make me suffer Watson’s contempt.

“That is work for accountants and your own maternal skills,” I replied, and it was a greater struggle than I would have liked to keep my voice calm and composed, “not the task for which you have sought me out. What would you have of me, precisely, Your Grace?”

If I had a momentary hope to have trapped her in so direct a question, she dashed it with such skill that it seemed a vain thing only moments after. “To find him for me, Mister Holmes,” she murmured, “to find him and persuade him to see me, so that we may settle the matter between us and perhaps even reconcile. ‘Tis not what a decent woman would ask, perhaps, but that is what I ask of you.”

Breaking my gaze from her own dark, imploring stare, I nodded assent. “Very well. What information do you have that could lead me to him?”

“I have prepared it for you already,” she said softly, rising from her chair and moving to my side to press a small bundle of papers into my hand. “It should be more than sufficient for your needs. If you have any further queries, where to reach me by post is also enclosed.” Her fingertips lingered on my skin, raising a heat there that I could not quite deny and making me wish, if only for a moment, that I was still living a shadowed life of intrigue at her side. I looked then at dear Watson, who seemed relieved that I had decided to help the distraught Lady, and the longing dissolved into a regret.

“Thank you, my dear Mister Holmes,” she breathed at last. “I have no doubt that you will succeed.”

She turned from me and retrieved her wrap, hat and gloves, then inclined her head to Watson with a small smile. “It is a pleasure to meet you as well, good doctor, after reading so many of your fine pages. I must say that you do not disappoint. I wish you the best of fortune, as fickle a thing as it may prove.”

With that and a final flashing glance of her dark eyes that pinned my own as a butterfly might be pinned on an examination board, she swept out the door and down the steps to the street as though all the world were her own dominion.

When I had bolted the door behind her and returned the the parlor, Olivia’s packet still in my hands, Watson was gathering up the tea things.

“I must say I don’t like it,” he told me. “Helping her reunite with that blackguard.”

“It seems unlikely to be a permanent reunion,” I replied, tucking the papers carefully into my pocket before walking to stand by the fire and warm the sudden chill from my hands.

He turned and stared at me for a moment, as though examining me for some clue or sign, and at last he cleared his throat and dropped his voice to an awkward murmur. “I say, Holmes, it seems very much as if you know that woman personally.”

Had I not been expecting that statement or something like it, I would have flinched and given myself away. As it was, it took a monumental effort to keep my tone light and uncaring. “Oh, the Lady Cavendish consulted me once before. It was after you’d begun your practice.”

“You didn’t mention her?” he inquired, though all but a shadow of suspicion had gone out of his voice.

“It was a trifling matter,” I lied smoothly, “and far too dull for one of your accounts.”

* * *

The contents of the papers she gave me that afternoon were, of course, perfectly calculated to drive me to meet her again. One or two items of information which suggested the opportunities which I had been allowing to slip through my fingers, a few lines from my factors and agents suggesting how the careful skein of our joined affairs was fraying at the edges - these were the delicate probes, the quick darts of the rapier point probing my defenses. Perhaps she thought I would be so easily tempted back to her, but I doubt it. They were spice to the main thrust, no more and no less.

Five sketches made up the heart of the matter, as deft as the application of the stiletto knife with which she had once saved my life from a would-be assassin. Each was executed with the elegant perfection of Olivia’s hand, charcoal on fine paper, and the shape of each line was as faultless as the skin of her body had seemed before I came to study it more closely than my own. The children came first, of course, at play among the blocks and toys of their nursery, Helen watching Michael and one small hand upraised to catch his woodblock tower before it could tumble into ruin. A sketch of each of them alone followed, Helen’s features captured in abstract thought and Michael’s in sleep, and I found my throat tightening around a wave of longing. When I had made the decision to return to Watson, the thought of never seeing my children again had been a cold truth made bearable by the knowledge they would be safe and loved in the Cavendishs’ house, but now, seeing their portraits nearly crushed my intellect under the weight of my longing.

The fourth sketch I will not describe even here, save that it was of Olivia displayed in a fashion suitable to heat my blood and set my pulse thundering in my temples with fresh desire. But it was the fifth that caught me and held me, as I was then and am now certain that it was meant to: Olivia, curled upon her favorite chair with the sketchbook in her lap, studying her own expression in the long mirror beside her fireplace as her charcoal etched out each line of grief, anger, fear and confusion that plagued her, the study door open behind her in silent invitation.

It was right, I thought then, to at least bid her farewell, even if I knew I could not explain my leaving in any way that would satisfy her.

Carefully folding the sketches, I stood before a slit I had made in the wallpaper years before, a hiding place even my dear friend knew nothing about. Now I hesitated, for the first time feeling pain at the separation between all my secret affairs and the comfortable life I led with Watson. Still, I slid the sketches into the wall, and set to writing an encoded reply to Olivia.

* * *

There was a small, warmly lit cafe on a side street near Regent’s Park that had never seen the faces of the Lady Cavendish or Mister Sherlock Holmes, and never would again. When I arrived Olivia was already there, sitting in a back corner and surveying the entire room from behind her fan with the deceptively casual glance of a woman awaiting her lover.

Which was, in all but the most important of details, an entirely correct deduction.

“My dear Mister Holmes,” she breathed at last, once I was seated and the bottles of warm, foreign rice wine were placed between us. “I am honored you chose to favor me with your presence.”

I smiled ruefully as I sat and lifted the small ceramic cup in curiosity. “I could not refuse such a heartfelt request, my Lady,” I replied, watching her eyes as I drank. The sake was surprisingly pleasant for a novelty fashion, woody and sweet. “Especially from yourself.”

Her fan snapped closed, the sound harsh in the half-enclosed space of the corner booth, and her eyes flared with a dangerous light. “Such concern for my welfare,” she murmured, her voice taut and sharp with barely controlled emotion. “I hardly know how to express my gratitude.”

“You are an expert at ensuring your own welfare,” I reminded her, taking in the tightness of the skin around her eyes, the strength of her grip on the fan. Her dress was as careful, elegant, and nondescript as ever. “I never doubted it was in danger.”

Her slim, gloved fingers tightened so fiercely upon the fan that I was sure her knuckles were white beneath the fine leather. “Would that I had such confidence in yours,” she hissed, “for it would have spared me much sleep lost.”

“I did not see,” I mustered at last, unable to hold her eyes, “how any words of parting I could devise would assist you.”

“Assist me? _Assist me?_ ” She caught herself on the verge of raising her voice to a shriek, and clamped her fine ivory teeth together so fiercely in order to contain herself that it must have pained her. We sat there in silence for two dozen of her short, controlled inhalations of breath before at last she could speak again in something approaching a discreet tone. “What is it precisely, my darling, that you could not imagine how to assist me with? The thought of raising my children without their father, the prospect of continuing in my life and my enterprises without the man I had chosen to share them with, or the meek acceptance of your decision to return to the lover who abandoned you for a wife when I grew to be an insufficient distraction?”

“Olivia.” I lifted my eyes to hers again, seeing the cold fire in them, and felt an answering chill as my own hands tightened. “I am not susceptible, as Watson is, to false pleas for sympathy. You know me better than that, I am certain."

She stilled, her eyes not moving from mine for some time, and then the corners of her mouth turned up in an icy smile as she inclined her head. "It was particularly stupid of you, my darling, to leave me wondering after your whereabouts."

"If I had not, you would simply have come to fetch me. I might not have been able to deny you."

"Without your precious Watson, you mean."

"Precisely."

"If I were a man," she murmured, so softly that the words were almost swallowed by the whispers of the half-empty cafe, "I would call him out and shoot him dead."

“If you did,” I told her without the least tremor in my hands, “I would not warrant the continuance of your life with a farthing.”

“Just so.” The edge of her mouth curved up, candlelight catching a hint of ivory teeth. “I had thought your affection for me might stay your hand, but I was not certain of it.”

“Nor I,” I admitted. “It is a contingency I have no desire to test.”

“You will not come home with me. Every device and persuasion I might employ, you have considered.”

“I have.”

Her hands clenched, and the thin wood and metal of her fan gave way like the snapping of tiny bones. “Do you love him so much more than I? Than our children?”

“No.” I shook my head, and at last allowed her to see the cold and desolate pain which neither reason nor familiar habit could fully excise from me. “The contrary, in truth. But he can provide me what I require, and you cannot.”

“Your Boswell?” she bit out, though it was but a weak cut. She had my measure now, and I could see the fine mesh gears of her mind churning over what I had said and racing toward the inevitable conclusion.

“My conscience,” I replied, and it was by the greatest effort that I did not reach out to her. “A check and restraint upon my hubris.”

“I would not see you restrained,” she breathed, and there were tears in the eyes which had for three years commanded my every desire, “to save London or the wide world from burning.”

“I know it, and that is why I cannot return. It is why I require Watson, Mrs. Hudson, Baker Street. Mycroft. My clients.”

She cast the broken fan down on the table between us, turning away from me at last, and she could not keep her voice steady for all her guile. “I cannot persuade you.”

“You have much yet,” I murmured, and pressed my hand upon the table until the pain came so that I could not be moved to embrace her and give all away at once.

She laughed, a sound without warm or solace, and gathered herself to sit straight and proud. Still she would not cast her eyes toward me, as if some twin of my fear echoed in her breast. “Speak no more, my love - no more tonight. ‘You may my glories and my state depose, but not my griefs; still am I king of those.’”

One last time, I did as she asked of me, and left her to her silence and the tears she would not let me see. I wandered in London for some hours before I could return to Baker Street, the sky having taken pity on me and poured out sufficient rain to wash away all evidence of anything that held more matter than an evening chill.

“Goodness, Holmes, can’t you bring an umbrella on your walkabouts?” Watson scolded me as I hung my dripping greatcoat on the rack by the door. At once he took my hand, testing the clamminess of the skin, and held the back of his own hand to my forehead. “Well,” he huffed up at me, gentle crossness replacing his worry, “you haven’t caught yourself a fever, anyway, though Heaven knows you deserve to have done.”

For once I could make no retort, and allowed myself to be led to the fire so that the civilized dryness and warmth that Watson required of me could be repaired. Outside, the rain and the wind lashed the city as if they would go on until every trace of it was washed into the Thames.

“Watson,” I said at last, my eyes upon the fire and my fingers laced together against my lips to hold back the memory of my Empress’s mouth, “when you go up to Highgate on Sunday next, I should like to go with you.”

The look he gave me then made me suspect that he knew all--it was a shrewd look, and yet so full of his habitual compassion and patience that, in that moment, I had no fear of discovery.

“Of course, Holmes,” he murmured. “I will be glad of the company, in fact.”

“As will I,” I told him, my eyes fixed at last upon the pale blue of his, and found that no more words were necessary.


	6. Epilogue

**Eastbourne, Sussex, England  
** **August 16, 1914**

He was still a tall man, and though age had put gray streaks in his hair and stolen some of the furious energy from his stride, he was still remarkable enough to draw glances from those whom he passed on the dusty country road. The fame of Sherlock Holmes of London had faded a little, these past ten years of quiet life in the country, and his face had never been well known to begin with. Still, some of his neighbors knew him and some had their suspicions. Occasionally, though it was not much in his nature, he wondered if any of them even dreamed of the reason he had chosen Sussex for his retirement.

Beekeeping, indeed.

The grounds of Compton Place were not unguarded, in spite of its fashionable seclusion in the countryside, but he passed the groundskeepers undisturbed in spite of the lateness of the hour. His welcome was, after all, sufficiently familiar to them - he had been making much this same walk, in much this same fashion, for the last ten years.

“If you had any sense,” a soft voice called to him from the portico of one of the state bedrooms overlooking the unspoiled portion of the grounds, “you would let me send a car for you instead of tiring yourself with walking from that farm of yours.”

Inclining his distinguished face towards the graceful figure standing silhouetted on the balcony by the soft light spilling from the parted french doors behind her, the retired detective smiled. “I am hardly tired, my dear,” Holmes replied jovially, “and if I let myself be trucked about I would surely lose not only the pleasures of the countryside but also what vigor that still remains to me.” He stopped beside the rhododendron shrubbery that covered the foot of the manor. “If, perhaps, you would allow me to drive, I might be more inclined to accept your gracious offer.”

“No power on Earth could convince me to do so,” she retorted, vanishing back into the room so that her voice echoed out to him. “But stay there a moment, and I’ll fetch you!”

The small door of the house opened to admit him, the warm stark glow of electric light spilling from it, and the slim and fashionably dressed woman who greeted him from it wore her hair in an untended spill of dark curls that suggested she had not expected company. “Well, then, come here and let me look at you,” she told him sternly. “Two years of trips to America and Ireland, and scarcely a word about your case. Now I hear that you and your good Doctor Watson have been to London with a guest who has much discouraged Baron Von Herling, and that the Germans are in Belgium. _You_ have been up to something.”

Bowing, the detective brushed a kiss across the lady’s hand, eyes twinkling. “We are living in an eventful time, my dear. I trust that you yourself have not been idle?”

“Father,” Helen Miranda Cavendish told him with a sternness that did not quite match the smile playing upon her lips, “you know very well that Uncle Mycroft doesn’t like me to discuss business matters without his express written permission, and that looking after you and mother would be a full-time occupation even without that distraction.”

Folding his daughter into his arms, Sherlock Holmes chuckled. “Will I never convince you that I need no looking after? After all, I somehow managed for quite some time before you came along.”

She scoffed disapprovingly, though she returned his embrace with a will. “Before and after Mother, you had the good Doctor to look after you, and before that I can only thank a youthful constitution and the favor of Providence that you did not come to a terrible mischief.”

“Hm,” the detective hummed. “I will concede, at least, that your care is of great comfort to my old bones and my heart,” he said, holding her at arm’s length, “and that I couldn’t be prouder of your vocation.” Examining her face, he frowned. “You look a bit drawn. Mycroft has been working you too hard.”

“The world has caught fire, father. I do not think I would like him to spare me labor.” She smiled up at him, a quirk of reproof at the corner of her mouth, her steel gray eyes the mirror of his own but her face quite the picture of her mother’s. “You are also a terrible liar. I know very well you would rather have had me take after your profession than his.”

Offering his arm to his daughter, he smiled. “It would have pleased me more, yes, but I don’t think it would have been very wholesome for either of us,” he explained. “And I still would not have been more proud of your brilliance.”

“Smoothly done,” she noted admiringly. “Michael says that the world is not quite ready for a female consulting detective, anyway. I have pointed out that the world was hardly ready for you, either, but that seems not to move him. He’ll be sorry to have missed you, but he’s in London and is likely to stay there for the foreseeable future. Something about sorting out the Navy’s war plans to his satisfaction.”

“I’m sure he’ll arrange things agreeably.” Amusement and pride both brought color and life to his expression. “Has the chain of command completely in his pocket already? I’d have expected it to take a bit longer than that. Two or three years from now, perhaps.”

“You know how it is with Michael. Always impatient. Mother says he gets that from you.” Helen’s eyes sparkled up at him. “He’s even found time to court a wife, though she hasn’t said yes yet. He says he’s planning a spring wedding.”

Even in his twilight years, Holmes had managed to retain a brilliant grin. “Excellent. I will write him to congratulate him and inquire as to the exact dates of birth of my forthcoming grandchildren.”

“You mustn’t joke, father,” she warned him with a wink. “You’ll give him ideas.”

They went up the stairs together laughing, her touch dousing the electric light of each passage as they abandoned it, until they came to the third landing and she paused to rest her other hand upon his shoulder. “Mother is in her study,” she told him softly. “I will expect you at breakfast for a full report on this spy business.”

With an answering squeeze of her hand, the detective leaned forward to place a kiss on her forehead. “As you wish, my young lady.” Then he bid her goodnight and proceeded down the darkened corridor to the windowless room which rested at the heart of the east wing, its doors firmly locked except when company was expected and invited. He paused with his hand on the knob, hesitating a moment or two as he often did, and then - finding it unlocked - opened the door to let himself in.

“My dear Mister Holmes,” Olivia murmured softly without lifting her eyes from the manuscript upon which she was making careful notes with a fountain pen, “you are late by some seven hours. You and Doctor Watson could not bear to be parted without some unnecessary lingering, I take it.”

The detective approached her, standing within reach of her desk but keeping his arms at his sides. There were strands of grey in the darkness of her hair, the delicate lines of years etched into her face that she did not trouble herself to use makeup to hide, the thin gloves she had always favored concealing the way the years had thinned and sharpened her fingers. There were spectacles as well, steel-rimmed and carefully perched on her nose to allow her to read without the blinding headaches that had forced her to swallow her pride on the matter, and her gowns - still immaculately made as ever - were ever so slightly behind the fashion now. But then, they had neither of them been walking the streets of London for some years now, and she might have noted the same about his own garments with fair accuracy. Time had a way of working its way in when one least expected it. “You are, as always, correct,” he murmured. “He intends to try to rejoin the army.”

“Remarkable, at his age.” Her pen paused for a moment, then resumed making notes. “You did not try to dissuade him, but wished to, and so you lingered.”

Holmes nodded, sadness tingeing a faraway look. “I would have him live out the rest of his years in safety, but his nobility of spirit burns too brightly for that, and I cannot ask him to quench it.”

“You will always be a fool for that man,” she murmured softly, glancing up at him above the rims of her spectacles, “but I suppose it is ill-graced of me to complain when I am ever more the same when it comes to you. Sit down, my darling. There is a gift for you in the first drawer to my right.”

He took the chair which she obviously intended for him at the edge of the desk, just near the stove, and found a bottle of brandy and a glass waiting for him on the small table beside it. He filled the one from the other, setting the glass upon the stove to warm, and then opened the drawer to take from it a notebook bound in leather and settled it upon his lap. “You have not taken up the old habits?” he inquired, perhaps with a hint of nerves he would not have admitted to anyone.

“Something new,” she told him softly, her pen moving again upon the manuscript. “You may be as clever and resourceful as ever, but your prose has not much improved. If you wish anyone to pay attention to this masterwork on investigation, you shall have to take more pains to be understood or rely on my editing.”

He inclined his head in acknowledgement. “Point taken. This, though,” he lifted the notebook.

“Do simply read it, my lovely detective,” she cut in softly, her dark eyes catching ruby sparks from the stove as she looked at him with the old fierce passion in her gaze. “Then you will understand.”

He hesitated, then opened the cover, and upon the first page he found an entry in the neat, sharp crispness of her hand.

_First point of notice: a stained white glove in the pocket of a tall, dark man (see sketch upon page 2) which protrudes precisely one quarter of one inch, observed upon the fifth day of February last at the crossing of Bevington Street and Chambers, heading north toward the river._

_Second point of notice..._

Upon skimming the slim volume, Holmes ascertained that it contained details whose number and precision would make possible reliable deductions concerning the mystery described within its pages. Even as his brain began to digest the contents, he frowned. Of course there was much more in the world than even he was capable of committing to memory, but his complete unfamiliarity with the principals required explanation.

“Observations, or inventions?” he inquired softly.

She smiled then, a beautiful and shrewd expression not without its hints of cruelty but animated now most of all by the fierce excitement that had driven her into his arms during that first night of passion at Baker Street. “Castles in the air, my love. Shall we see how long it takes you to bring them crashing down?”

His eyes shone with an answering spirit. Though age had softened the relentlessness of his thoughts, his enthusiasm for mental acrobatics of the highest order was undimmed by the passage of years. Neither had his affection or desire for Olivia flagged; their separation of years had not begun out of a failure of sentiment.

Quickly and precisely, Holmes plucked the pen from her hands, placing it carefully in its receptacle without spattering a drop of ink on her work. Her gloved hand he then took in his own, kissing the fine leather and firm flesh beneath it, and it would have seemed a repetition of the chaste gesture he had shown his daughter not an hour before if not for the set of his lips and the passionate joy lighting his face.

“I will most assuredly have this dance,” he told Olivia, pulling them both to their feet.

“My dear Mister Holmes,” she told him laughingly, “you may ruin my dress if you continue in this fashion.”

“Then it will be ruined in a good cause,” he retorted crisply, lowering his mouth until it nearly brushed hers.

“So it will,” she agreed, laughter falling away into the husk of a whisper. “I look forward to seeing your solution, my darling, when I allow you out of my bed to attempt it.”

He lifted her in his arms, trusting that strength had not yet abandoned his limbs and finding that he felt twenty years younger for the effort, and then carried her from the room. It was a dark climb to her bedchamber, but his feet were sure of the steps, and when they came to the light of the lamp beside her bed he discovered to his astonishment that she had concealed the small red volume against her bodice without his notice.

“For later,” she instructed him, already beginning to unfasten her laces. “Now put out the light.”

Not for the first or the last time, he did as she told him. 


End file.
